In September midstream giant Dominion completed its $4.4 billion takeover of Questar Corporation (see $4.4B Dominion-Questar Merger Happens Tomorrow). Yesterday Dominion issued an announcement that the company is transferring the Questar Pipeline to its midstream subsidiary in a transaction worth $1.725 billion. It’s all complicated financial mumbo jumbo called a “dropdown” deal. Essentially Dominion will take money out of one of its pockets and put the money back in another pocket. There are (potentially) different groups of investors for each, so there is a real consequence. We mention the transaction because Questar is a Rockies-based integrated natural gas company operating through three principal subsidiaries. The Dominion deal to buy Questar is an attempt by Dominion to diversify out of the northeast/Mid-Atlantic region. In other words, this is all a big distraction (from our point of view) to the work that needs to get done here at home in the Marcellus/Utica…
