Transco history

The company was organized in October 1948, as Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line Corporation, to build what would be, at the time, the world’s longest pipeline, stretching 1,832 miles from Hidalgo County, Texas, to New York City.

Claude Williams, the company’s first president, broke ground for the pipeline in May 1949.

The pipeline made its first delivery of gas in December 1950, to Danville, Virginia, and began serving New York a month later.

In 1952 the company engineered another coup, laying a pipeline 100 feet deep to connect the New York boroughs of Brooklyn and Staten Island.

Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line built the first offshore pipeline in the Gulf of Mexico in 1957, a 21-mile line off the coast of Louisiana.

In December 1958 the company’s daily deliveries of gas exceeded one billion cubic feet for the first time; seven years earlier, the largest daily demand had been less than 350 million cubic feet.

In 1963 the company began development of an underground storage field in Pennsylvania and started construction on an above-ground storage tank for liquefied natural gas in New Jersey.

In 1968 corporate assets reached $1 billion for the first time, up from $54.8 million at the company’s inception 20 years earlier.

Later in 1973, Transco prepared to launch a joint venture with National Iranian Oil Company, in which natural gas products would be processed in Iran and transported to the United States for conversion into pipeline-quality gas.

In 1974 the FPC raised price limits for newly discovered gas, and the producers became more interested in Transco, which in turn was willing to finance exploration.

In 1977 an FPC administrative law judge found the company innocent of improperly withholding gas supplies, noting the decline in natural gas supplies.

The parent company also ventured into other energy businesses, including coal; it bought three coal companies from General Energy Corporation of Lexington, Kentucky, in 1982, for about $70 million.

The purchase of Northwest Energy Company was the beginning of the company’s nationwide system of interstate natural gas pipelines.1985.

There was a resulting decrease in natural gas prices and an increase in competition; responding to this, Transco’s pipeline subsidiaries became permanent open access pipelines in 1988, transporting gas that customers had purchased from other companies.

Transco Exploration and Production made 11 gas discoveries in 1990.

Early in 1991 Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line and five other companies joined to launch onshore and offshore pipeline systems to transport natural gas from the Mobile Bay area in the gulf off Alabama.

The acquisition of Transco Energy Company expanded Williams’ natural gas transportation system to the East Coast and established the company as one of the nation’s largest-volume transporters of natural gas, now delivering about half of the natural gas consumed in New York City.1998.

The results of the company’s financial strengthening actions resulted in its return to investment-grade credit.2009.