A young trader made $250 million on Russian oil. Where is he building his business now?

German trader Christopher Eppinger, who made $250 million from trading Russian oil after the war began in 2022, now intends to capitalize on Guyana's oil boom, the Financial Times reports.

Eppinger told the publication that he got the idea to invest in Guyana over lunch with Houston-based oil traders discussing Chevron's $53 billion deal to buy US-based Hess, ExxonMobil's partner in Guyana. "I was very surprised because we found a country that has twice as many resources as Norway and yet the big Western traders have almost no presence there. Everything looked very new. So I decided to pack my bags and come here," he said.

Eppinger's Petrichor Energy intends to invest up to $60 million in Guyana over three years. It plans to buy a quarry in this South American country, open a trading office and participate in government tenders for transportation of oil and other fuels.

"I got goosebumps running. This is what I have been waiting for all my life. I am coming to a new market where everything is possible," the trader told the publication.

Guyana, a former British colony in the northeast of South America with a population of about 800 thousand people, has experienced rapid economic growth since the US ExxonMobil in 2015 discovered here one of the largest fields in decades. Between 2019 and 2024, the state's GDP increased almost fivefold to $25 billion, and oil production now exceeds 900,000 barrels a day, the FT writes.

Eppinger came to prominence following a Financial Times investigation in November 2025. The FT called him "almost certainly the youngest trader" to make a fortune from the energy crisis following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The publication, which spoke to the trader himself and more than a dozen industry sources and examined financial documents, claimed that between 2022 and 2025, Eppinger traded about $2 billion worth of oil and oil products and made more than $250 million in personal profits.

He was 27 years old when the war began. Eppinger was born near Hamburg in 1994. His parents, both born in the Soviet Union, moved to Germany in the 1980s. Ma was a doctor and his father was an engineer. Eppinger's only dream was to become an oil trader. He was inspired by the image of oil tycoon J.R. Ewing from the TV series "Dallas" and also by the father of his close friend Andre van Gils, a veteran global oil trader who started his career at European giant Vitol and then traded oil independently.

Eppinger studied business at the University of Hamburg and, at 21, interned at KazMunaiGas, Kazakhstan's national oil company, where he made his first connections. He later took a job with SET Select Energy, a Hamburg-based trading company, which sent him back to Kazakhstan. "We went around to all the local oil suppliers, I was buying it for cash right from the damn fields. We were taking the oil to the refinery in strange old cars. Everything stank in there. It was minus 40 degrees in the winter, plus 40 degrees in the summer," Eppinger described in the FT article.

After two and a half years at Select, Eppinger started his own company in Hamburg and tried to work independently but lost money to partners, the investigation alleged. He took a job with a small trading firm in Dubai, where he built a connection with the management of the German Uniper refinery in Fujairah. After the outbreak of war in Ukraine, the refinery stopped importing Russian fuel oil and was looking for new suppliers. Eppinger seized the opportunity.

In an interview with the FT, Eppinger admitted that in the past he was jealous of traders whose careers had taken place during the collapse of the USSR, which opened up huge opportunities in commodities trading. "I was literally sad that the 90s went by without me, but that's not the case now, because something similar is happening now," he reasoned.

His company CE Energy began trading fuel oil that came from Russia through intermediaries and passed through the Fujairah tank system, receiving a certificate that the batch had been blended in the UAE. This was apparently enough for the buyers, the FT writes. CE Energy sold fuel oil to Uniper and Vitol, which also has a refinery in Fujairah, the investigation said. Both companies declined to comment.

According to Eppinger, he would not have traded Russian raw materials if Western countries had imposed a complete embargo on them, but they limited themselves to a price ceiling. The trader himself and his lawyers insist that all his transactions were in compliance with Western restrictions and that his company stopped trading Russian raw materials in February 2025.

Eppinger considered investing in the Middle East after that, but opted against working in the region, which now seems like a forward-thinking decision, he told the FT. "I think I was protected by some higher power or something," the trader said. He also claims he has no interest in trading Russian oil, despite tensions in the oil market over the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

"You have to leave the casino when you win," he said. - I was very happy with the money I made and didn't want to get into the madness."

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor