McGuireWoods served as legal advisor to Dominion Resources Inc. in its $4.4 billion acquisition of Questar Corp., a deal which will expand Dominion’s natural gas assets into the western United States and create a combined company that serves 4.8 million electric utility and natural gas customers in seven states. The deal is expected to close by the end of 2016.
Headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, Dominion is one of the nation’s largest producers and transporters of energy, with a portfolio of 24,300 megawatts of generation, 12,200 miles of natural gas transmission, gathering and storage pipeline, and 6,500 miles of electric transmission lines. Dominion operates one of the nation’s largest natural gas storage systems with 933 billion cubic feet of storage capacity and serves utility and retail energy customers in 14 states.
Questar, headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, serves nearly 1 million homes and businesses in Utah, Wyoming and Idaho, with approximately 97 percent of its customer accounts in Utah. The company has 1,700 employees and $4.2 billion in assets, including 27,500 miles of gas distribution pipeline, 3,400 miles of gas transmission pipeline and 56 billion cubic feet of working gas storage.
The McGuireWoods team representing Dominion was led by partner Joanne Katsantonis, who chairs the firm’s energy industry team, and partner Jay Hughes. The team included partners Jane Whitt Sellers, who handled the securities aspects of the deal, and Charles Menges, who handled deal financing, as well as other lawyers across multiple practices.
“We were proud to assist Dominion in this major acquisition of strategically important assets,” Katsantonis said. “This is another great example of the teamwork that McGuireWoods employs for our energy industry clients. We couldn’t be happier with the result.”
McGuireWoods’ multidisciplinary energy team boasts more than 100 lawyers who work across multiple sectors, from electric and gas, to natural gas and renewable fuels, to coal and Marcellus shale, and emerging technologies.
The team represents 20 energy companies listed in the Fortune 500. The projects handled by the firm’s energy team represent approximately 30,500 megawatts of electric capacity with a combined value of more than $100 billion. They include solar, coal-fired, gas-fired, nuclear, and hydroelectric power generation and cogeneration facilities, as well as nonconventional projects using alternative technologies and fuels. McGuireWoods received a nationwide ranking for Energy: Electricity in the 2015 Chambers USA guide.
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