Souki and Smith worked out a partnership. Smith took controlling interest in one of the proposed sites, Freeport, about seventy miles south of Houston. Souki pushed ahead on a project at Sabine Pass in Louisiana, on the border with Texas. Two international majors signed twenty-year contracts to use Cheniere’s Sabine Pass facility to regasify their LNG shipped in from the other parts of the world. The financial markets were now taking Cheniere seriously. Its stock price rose twenty-five-fold and then split.
