Making a new start in business
During pandemic older people are becoming entrepreneurs at an increasing rate for many reasons
In April, Dave Summers lost his job as director of digital media productions at the American Management Association, a casualty of layoffs brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.
Summers, 60, swiftly launched his own business as a digital media producer, coach and animator who creates podcasts, webcasts and video blogs.
And in September, he and his wife, who teaches nursery school, moved from Danbury, Conn., to Maryville, Tenn., which they discovered while visiting their son in Nashville, Tenn. “My new work is all virtual, so I can live anywhere,” he said. “Not only is it a cheaper place to live, we love hiking and the outdoors, and our new town is in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.”
Droves of small businesses have been shuttered by the economic fallout of the coronavirus, but for Dave Summers, starting a new one was the best option.
“I’m not sitting on a massive nest egg, so I need to work to keep af loat,” he said. “It’s also about being healthy and happy. I can’t just retire, because underneath it all I’m creative, and I have to be busy doing stuff and helping people tell their stories.”
While the coronavirus pandemic is causing many older workers who have lost jobs, or who have been offered early retirement severance packages, to decide to leave the workforce, others like Summers are shifting to entrepreneurship.
In fact, older Americans had already been starting new businesses at a fast rate. In 2019, research from the Kauffman Foundation, a nonpartisan group supporting entrepreneurship, found that more than 25 percent of new entrepreneurs were ages 55 to 64, up from about 15 percent in 1996.
Across the age spectrum, there has been a rise in new business startups since May, according to the Census Bureau. The surge is likely “powered by newly unemployed individuals opting to start their own businesses, either by choice or out of necessity,” according to the Economic Innovation Group, a bipartisan public policy organization.
“Older women, in particular,” said Elizabeth Isele, founder and chief executive of the Global Institute for Experienced Entrepre
lutely valid, especially the part about COVID,” said Jeremy Martin, vice president of Energy and Sustainability at the Institute of the Americas, a think-tank located at the University of California San Diego. “There were probably two or three months of delay, 100 percent ascribed to the COVID situation.”
Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has been a longtime critic of energy reform measures put in place by his predecessors that encouraged private investment by foreign companies into the Mexico energy and power sectors.
Since coming into office in December 2018, the López Obrador administration has suspended oil bloc auctions and the Energy Ministry tried to slow down private clean energy generation — efforts aimed to bolster the financial positions of the country’s state-run energy companies.
Earlier this week, the CEO of Spanish energy company Iberdrola threatened to stop investing in Mexico if the López Obrador administration is not open to encouraging foreign and private investment.
Martin said he would be uncomfortable saying the López Obrador administration is holding up the IEnova LNG permit.
“I think there’s a huge array of examples why there seems to be a perception that this project is being delayed for ideological reasons but I can’t draw that conclusion definitively,” Martin said.
Energía Costa Azul expansion is considered to be a big money-maker because of its location on the Pacific coast. China, Japan and other Asian countries are hungry to receive cargoes of LNG because natural gas burns about twice as clean as coal and is relatively inexpensive.
The vast majority of LNG export facilities in North America are located in the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Texas. In order to send LNG to Asian destinations, op
erators have to pay tolls to go through the Panama Canal.
But cargo ships leaving a terminal in Baja can bypass the tolls and arrive in Asia in about half the time as shipments from the Gulf Coast.
Energía Costa Azul opened in 2008 as an import facility but since then, natural gas production in the United States has boomed and a burgeoning LNG export market has sprung up, with San Diego-based Sempra Energy investing billions to become one of the industry’s global leaders.
If the project moves forward, the natural gas would come from the Permian Basin in West Texas and southeastern New Mexico via pipeline to Energía Costa Azul.
In the LNG process, facilities take the gas, cool it to minus-260 degrees Fahrenheit, load the liquefied product onto specially made cargo tanks on doublehulled ships and ship the LNG to markets overseas.
Sempra opened a $10 billion LNG facility on the Louisiana Gulf Coast last year and has plans to build an even bigger facility not far a away in the town of Port Arthur, Texas.
Earlier this month, López Obrador announced $14 billion for 39 infrastructure projects to help boost Mexico’s economy.
Among the projects is about $1.2 billion for an LNG facility called Salina Cruz in the state of Oaxaca. Proposed to be built by the government, Salina Cruz LNG would essentially mimic what Energía Costa Azul plans to do — take natural gas sourced from the U.S. and export it to foreign markets.
“We don’t believe this announcement impacts (Energía Costa Azul), as we understand Salina Cruz to be in the very earliest stages of development,” said Sempra spokeswoman PatyOrtega Mitchell, adding the project “shows alignment with our view that the construction of LNG export terminals on Mexico’s Pacific coast can benefit the country’s economic recovery through investment, tax revenue and jobs.”