Williams CEO Alan Armstrong made it clear this week he’s not ready to commit his company to building a natural gas pipeline to New England as long as the area’s governors oppose the project.
It puts him in opposition to President Trump who wants the Constitution natural gas pipeline to be built in order to transmit natural gas to New York and other New England states in order to lower electricity costs.
“We’re not gonna go putting our neck out until they invite us with the red carpet rolled out,” Armstrong said boldly in an interview with Barron’s during the CERAWeek conference in Houston.
He said Willilams, the Tulsa company, already had lost hundreds of millions of dollars invested in two failed pipelines into the Northeast over the past decade. The Constitution pipeline was one of them. It would have sent natural gas from Pennsylvania into New York and surrounding states but it died after New York denied water quality permits in 2020.
Armstrong signaled his company is going where it’s wanted.
“We have so much more demand for gas to the south, so many more projects, that we’re not gonna stick our neck out” to try to invest in the Northeast, he remarked in the Barron’s interview.
Williams further said the Northeast part of the U.S. has obviously missed out on the data center boom because of high power prices and the lack of pipelines, which he blames on the states. Armstrong’s company is among those firms benefiting from the natural gas demand to supply power plants for data centers.