Williams Appoints 3 New Board Members, Confounds Corp Raider
If you’ve read MDN for any length of time, you already know of the ongoing soap opera of corporate raiders attempting to pressure Williams, a huge pipeline company in the northeast (and in the rest of the country) into selling itself to Energy Transfer Equity–a deal that fell apart in June (see Dead as a Doornail: ETE Terminates Merger with Williams). You also know that one of the corporate raiders (Carl Icahn protege) Keith “Mini-Me” Meister tried to force Williams CEO Alan Armstrong to resign, and when that didn’t happen, Meister and five others quit the board of directors in a huff (see Half of Williams Board, Including 2 Corporate Raiders, Quit). The raiders’ sole purpose in forcing Armstrong out is to force a new sale to a different company, Enterprise Products Partners (see Here We Go Again: Enterprise Products Wants to Buy Williams). Williams isn’t having it and announced earlier this month they were on the hunt to replace three of the six losers who quit the board with bona fide/qualified/independent board members (see Williams to Appoint 3 New Board Members, Replace Raiders Who Quit). Last week Mini-Me Meister launched a proxy war to elect himself and nine other of his lackeys to the Williams board (see Corvex Raider Launches Hostile Takeover Attempt of Williams). Good news: Williams has confounded Meister by naming three new board members. Each of them comes with stellar qualifications to help guide the company into the future WITHOUT selling itself to line the pockets of corporate raiders…
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Once upon a time, before Energy Transfer Equity (ETE) made an indecent proposal to Williams to buy them out (see 
Corporate raider and Carl Icahn protege Keith “Mini-Me” Meister, Managing Partner of Corvex Management, has launched a full-out assault and takeover attempt of midstream company Williams. Yesterday MDN reported that Meister has floated a slate of 10 of his own people–including himself–as candidates for the board of directors for a scheduled vote during the annual meeting later this year (see 
Just when you thought things had finally settled down with midstream giant Williams, a new rumor is making the rounds. Brief history: Energy Transfer Equity’s (ETE) billionaire CEO Kelsy Warren propositioned Williams for over six months before going public with his overtures (see 
Pennsylvania residents: It’s time to (once again) show your support for the Atlantic Sunrise Pipeline project, a $3 billion, 198-mile project running through 10 Pennsylvania counties to connect Marcellus Shale natural gas from PA with the Williams’ Transco pipeline in southern Lancaster County. It is a much-needed pipeline to move more Marcellus gas south, to new markets. In the past MDN has asked you to sign letters going to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and to the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP). And you, our dear readers, have been the most responsive audience to get behind the effort to support this project. Thank you! We’re coming to you again with a new request. 
Chesapeake Energy had some big news on Tuesday. The company is selling off its Barnett Shale assets, and in the process lightening the company’s future debt load considerably. This is a bit complicated, but we’ll try our best to break it down. Chesapeake announced Tuesday they are handing over the keys to 215,000 Barnett Shale acres (some developed, some not), along with 2,800 operational wells–giving it away to Saddle Barnett Resources LLC, a Dallas-based firm backed by First Reserve Corp. In return, Saddle Barnett is taking on renegotiated midstream contracts with Williams. The net result for Chesapeake is that the deal will “incinerate” about $1.9 billion in payments they would have had to make to Williams and others. As we said, it considerably lightens the stress on Chesapeake’s balance sheet. Williams is trying to put a happy face on the fact they will get less money after the deal than before. But then again, a solvent Chesapeake (and/or Saddle Barnett) paying something less is better than a bankrupt Chesapeake paying nothing. Why cover this story on MDN, a Marcellus/Utica focused website? Because if Chesapeake did it in the Barnett in Texas, they (or someone else) may try to do something similar in the Marcellus/Utica…
We have been making the point, loudly, for the past year, that IF New York State blocks the Constitution Pipeline, as they have now done, the state runs the very real risk of having the federal government strip away their right to make such decisions about any federally-approved pipeline project. We’ve previously warned that New York is in grave danger of losing their power by attempting to block the Constitution. We wrote the following in October 2015: When MDN editor Jim Willis attended the Shale Insight conference in Philadelphia in September, he listened to a panel discussion of midstream (pipeline) experts, including a former FERC commissioner. He got to ask a question and the question, roughly, was this: “The NY DEC is currently holding up the FERC-approved Constitution Pipeline. What if the DEC refuses to issue the necessary permits? What happens next?” The answer Jim got was, “It depends.” The bottom line seems to be that it’s likely FERC (and Williams) will need to take the DEC to court. The DEC frankly has no legal right to prevent a federally approved project from being built. That’s the bottom line. It may take a court to force the DEC (and Gov. Cuomo) to act, but in this matter the law is on our side. This is not a question of “if,” it is a question of “when” the pipeline will get built (see 
Time to do a happy dance. THE (arrogant) Delaware Riverkeeper has lost yet another court case–one of many such cases they continuously file to stop any fossil fuel-related project in the northeast. In March MDN told you that THE Delaware Riverkeeper had sued the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, challenging their decision to approve the Williams Transco Pipeline’s Leidy Southeast Expansion from PA to New York City (see 
Earlier this week Williams announced a deal to sell its Canadian businesses and assets to Inter Pipeline for $1 billion. Williams is wasting no time following the aborted merger attempt by Energy Transfer Equity to buy Williams. Following that aborted attempt, nearly half of the Williams board quit because they couldn’t get their grubby hands on big piles of money (see 
