The Oklahoma man trying to bring a $400 million liquefied natural gas facility to Pleasant Point appears to be an energy tycoon on his Web site.

Yet Donald Smith, owner of Smith Cogeneration in Oklahoma City, is the first to say that many of the multimillion-dollar projects listed as being in development are “on ice” while he fights “corruption” that is trying to destroy his efforts or international energy conglomerates that are trying to outgun him.

At least five projects are listed on his Web site, www.smith

cogeneration.com, from a coal-fired plant in Pakistan to floating platform power plants in India, China and Bangladesh. Also listed are “independent power producers” in “various United States locations,” endeavors that Smith said he hasn’t announced yet.

Although awe-inspiring, the projects have presented years-long struggles to get off the ground, said Smith during a recent interview. He declined to get into too many details on the record about the obstacles he has faced because he is trying to work other deals with foreign countries and broker partnerships with major corporations.

At least twice either a major corporate partner or a foreign government has claimed that Smith Cogeneration was not meeting its financial obligations, according to public documents. Smith said his company was not broke, but that it didn’t want to be involved in activities that included under-the-table deals in order to secure contracts.

Absent from the Web site is the 42-acre Pleasant Point LNG project, which Smith said was an oversight. He said he has information he is not ready to share, including the identities of one or several big-name corporations that he may partner with to build the LNG terminal at Pleasant Point. He said the names are not being released because negotiations with them are ongoing.

“More than one [corporation] has asked us if they can come in as a partner,” Smith said. “They’ve asked us not to talk about it.”

Smith has publicly mentioned several potential partners – Shell Oil, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips or BP, but he would not confirm their current status.

Smith Cogeneration, he said, is “well enough financed” to invest in the Pleasant Point project and additional funding may come from corporate lending institutions such as Prudential Insurance or GE Capital Corp.

Smith said he does not dismiss the idea that there may be a company coming aboard the project as a “one-stop shop” supplying tankers and liquefied natural gas. Smith Cogeneration, though, “would stay in it for the long term,” he said.

Two international energy and marine construction companies already have had a role in the project. Kellogg Brown and Root of Houston, Texas, owned by oil and gas products conglomerate Halliburton, has given Smith an engineer’s drawing of a three-quarter-mile-long combination underground pipeline and above-water LNG tanker dock that will jetty into Gleason Cove. Moffatt & Nichol International, a New York City company that focuses on marine transportation systems, has given Smith similar drawings of an LNG unloading dock.

Smith readily shows off the sketches to anyone interested in finding out how the tankers will unload.

“Every company that comes into this deal is bigger and better than I am,” Smith said.

How Smith made his money – he said he will not discuss his finances – is from two projects that are up and running. One is “the world’s first and largest” power plant on a floating platform or barge located in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic. Using GE components, Smith Cogeneration and Enron Corp. constructed a generator that produces 185 megawatts of electricity on a barge that could be moved to other locations if needed.

Initially, the Dominican Republic project was solely in Smith Cogeneration’s hands. Enron, before its late 2001 Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, became a majority owner after heated squabbles among Enron, Smith Cogeneration and Dominican Republic officials, Smith said.

“Enron made promises to the government that the deal would be better off if they did it rather than us,” he said.

The other moneymaker is the PowerSmith Project, a 110-megawatt natural gas-fired cogeneration plant in Oklahoma City. Smith Cogeneration is the majority owner, but the company was not alone in the plant’s development. GE designed and constructed the plant, and performs operations and maintenance of the facility under a power-purchase agreement, according to Smith.