PAITA, Peru – Rex Canon stands on a crumbling desert cliff above the Pacific and points to a hazy spot at sea where Maple Energy PLC will finally meet the international marketplace.

Mr. Canon, who has homes in Highland Park and in Lima, Peru, is president of Maple Energy. It is an oil, gas and electricity company with a bewildering international pedigree – rooted in Dallas, incorporated in Dublin, traded in London and Lima yet with all its business in Peru.

Despite these global ties, Maple's first exports will ship from the small port of Paita on Peru's far northern coast. Mr. Canon expects the first ship to arrive here late next year for ethanol grown and distilled at Maple's nearby sugar cane plantation.

Maple's seed crop is flourishing along the banks of the muddy Chira River. Work will start soon on two pumping stations to lift river water up a 250-foot escarpment for drip irrigation across Maple's 25,000 acres of scrub-brush land.

"There's a lot of water here flowing unused into the sea," Mr. Canon said. "We're taking land that's nothing and turning it into something. What we are going to produce here will be the greenest ethanol you can make."

Maple's ethanol business plan arguably has several advantages over what's going on in Brazil, the colossus of sugar cane biofuels. The irrigated Peruvian desert grows an especially sugar-rich cane. It's close to the U.S. West Coast.

And a recent free-trade agreement with the United States means Peruvian ethanol can enter duty-free.

Maple expects to beat U.S. corn-based ethanol producers in the Midwest with a product that's cheaper to make and equal in shipping costs.

"We can go right into Southern California without paying that 54-cent tariff," Mr. Canon said. "It's the same cost for us to ship to California as it is to ship from the Midwest by rail cars."

Investors following Maple also appear to sense an opportunity. On a recent Friday while Mr. Canon was scouting the Paita cliffs, Maple shares went up 30 percent. The stock soared in April, from 91 to 150 British pence (about $2.97).

With annual sales of about $80 million, Maple is a modest-size company with a curious footnote in its history.

As a boy in Midland, Maple executive chairman Jack Hanks ran against and beat Bill Clinton for national vice president of Boys' Nation. But a classmate reports that Mr. Hanks lost to George W. Bush for president of the 7th grade. (Mr. Hanks says he remembers the race against Mr. Clinton, but not the one against Mr. Bush.)

During the 1980s and early '90s, Mr. Canon, Mr. Hanks and Oklahoma native Tony Hines ran a company out of Dallas that gathered natural gas from well owners in New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas for delivery and sale to gas utilities.

They sold the business in 1992, then looked around for a place where they could be pioneers.

They found Peru.

When Mr. Canon and Mr. Hanks came to have a look, Peru was a violent, politically unstable country. Terrorism was widespread, most of it carried out by a ruthless guerrilla group called Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path). President Alberto Fujimori had suspended Congress.

The government tried to interest Maple in a large gas field in the Amazon known as Camisea, but that project was too big and tangled in legal claims for the small Dallas company, Mr. Hanks said.

Peru eventually attracted a larger Dallas firm – Hunt Oil Co. – to the Camisea for a multibillion-dollar project. Hunt and its partners bring gas over the Andes for electric utilities and bottled gas plants.

In 2010, they plan to start exports of liquefied natural gas from the Peruvian coast to South Korea.

Maple instead offered to take on a collection of small oil and gas properties, including a refinery, developed in the 1930s in the Peruvian Amazon jungle; the government decided to hold an auction. Maple won but then spent a year negotiating terms with the Peruvian government.

Oil and gas projects in the Amazon have attracted strong opposition from some environmentalists and indigenous tribes, who say river pollution has contaminated fish and contact with the outside world has threatened the health of some isolated native peoples.

Mr. Canon said Maple has adhered to Peruvian laws for environmental protection and has never had a significant oil or gas spill. Harmful contact with isolated tribes has not been an issue, since Maple's jungle properties have been operating for 70 years.

Mr. Canon remembers negotiating with the government for months around a conference table in a 22-story Lima skyscraper where a bomb blast had broken every window.

Among the issues was what to do with a large natural gas field known as Aguaytia. The government wanted Maple to build and fuel a small power plant, then strip out the liquids from the field and reinject the bulk of the gas. Maple wanted to build a bigger, 150-megawatt power plant and transmit the electricity across the Andes.

The Aguaytia project wound up as Maple planned, but Maple's need to raise $273 million to complete the work meant bringing in outside investors and lenders. Maple was left with a minority interest in the project.

That's why Maple's principals decided to take Maple Energy public rather than dilute their control over the $157 million ethanol project, and they plan for additional drilling in Peru's central jungle.

The company ordered a powerful drilling rig and hopes to find oil at a site that preliminary studies suggest could have as much as 220 million barrels of oil.

The initial public offering was structured to make it possible for Peruvian pension funds to invest. Maple listed on the Alternative Investment Market exchange in London in July, and in Lima in December.

Incorporating in Dublin as a holding company offered tax advantages over a London or U.S. incorporation, Mr. Hanks said.

"It was one of those fortunate circumstances in corporate life," Mr. Hanks said. "We didn't do feasibility or markets studies. We took the chance, and it's paid off."

And opportunity keeps knocking in Peru.