Choosing private equity out of all the options for an oil and gas company in need of money is a choice each company makes for different reasons. "My wife looked at this question of why we chose private equity and said, 'Let's be honest. You were in debt. That's why you went to private equity,'" quips Randy Olmstead, president of Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Mid-Con Energy Corp. "We thought we needed more money than the banks would give us. It's still expensive to get equity, so we plan to supplement it." For some of the panelists at the recent COSCO Private Capital for Energy conference in Houston, their source of capital at the time was just not working out. "We had already spent a lot of our own money, so we went to private individuals," said Mark Wilson, president and chief executive of Tulsa-based Coronado Resources LLC. "We had a hard time dealing with them. Even the really wealthy ones had a hard time understanding the E&P business and committing. "When we found people wanting to join Coronado, we realized we could build something much larger than we originally thought, but we needed financial backing. Greenhill Capital Partners and Lime Rock Partners understood the approach we wanted to take, and they have been flexible with taking a long-term view to build something from the ground up." For more on this, see the July issue of Oil and Gas Investor. For a subscription, call 713-260-6441.