Williams has completed its acquisition of Southern Company Gas' Houston-based wholesale gas trading business, Sequent Energy Management, which made about $200 million selling natural gas during the Texas freeze in February.
The acquisition accelerates Williams’ natural gas pipeline and storage optimization and marketing growth and increases Williams’ gas pipeline marketing footprint, with expansions into new markets to reach incremental gas-fired power generation, liquified natural gas (LNG) exports and future renewable natural gas (RNG) and other emerging opportunities.
“The addition of Sequent Energy Management, including its talented workforce and industry leading platform, complements the current geographic footprint of our core pipeline transportation and storage business,” said Alan Armstrong, president and chief executive officer of Williams. “As we continue to take a leadership role towards a clean energy future, Williams sees significant opportunity to better source and deliver responsibly produced, low carbon supplies to domestic natural gas and international LNG customers.
"Sequent’s operational footprint in the U.S. and Canada provides Williams with an enhanced North American perspective of natural gas markets, in turn bolstering the company’s natural gas focused strategy, and I’m excited to welcome the Sequent employees to the Williams family,” Armstrong added.
Sequent moves gas to markets through transportation and storage agreements on strategically positioned assets, including along Williams’ Transco system. The company focuses on asset management and the wholesale marketing, trading, storage and transportation of natural gas for a diverse set of natural gas utilities and producers.
Earlier this year, in a late-April earnings call, Southern Company Gas CEO Tom Fanning discussed the February winter weather that crippled generating units and power grids in Texas and beyond. "Our wholesale gas services subsidiary Sequent Energy effectively served customers in need utilizing in large part, natural gas held in storage," he said. Adding that the company "took $75 million or so of the $200 million made and put it into our foundation ... to get reploughed back into communities."
