Transco currently transports around 20 percent of the country's natural gas.
US midstream gas major Williams and Co has announced a large-scale expansion of its flagship Transco pipeline network aimed at meeting the skyrocketing demand of the Virginian market.
The Power Express project represents an expansion of 950 million cubic feet per day and is expected to enter service in Q3 2030. The project is aimed at supporting the state's data center market, which is the largest in the world.
"We are encouraged by what we see on the data center opportunity front," Alan Armstrong, president and CEO of Williams, said in the company's first-quarter 2025 results on May 5.
Transco is the largest gas pipeline in the US, delivering natural gas from the Gulf Coast states through Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. Spanning 8,580 miles, the pipeline transports around 20 percent of the country’s natural gas.
Midstream gas companies are beginning to actively target data center hotspots as areas of huge capacity growth.
"We think natural gas is a great solution for the increasing power needs driven by AI and data centers. It’s reliable, scalable, and fits well within a broader decarbonization framework by integrating with renewable energy sources," Jaclyn Presnal, VP of New Energy Ventures at Williams, told DCD.
Much of this new growth is expected in the Southeastern states, which is leading utilities across the region to invest heavily in new gas generation assets to meet the projected demand.
In a report earlier this year from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), it was revealed that utilities across Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia are planning to build more than 20GW of natural gas power plants by 2040 to meet demand from the data center market.
To meet the demand, pipeline operators are expected to expand their infrastructure significantly, with operators serving these states - including Williams and Co - proposing or constructing more than 3.3 billion cubic feet per day of new pipeline capacity.
While the majority of the capacity is expected to go to utilities - up to 75 percent according to the IEEFA - pipeline companies are also open to serving data center customers behind-the-meter.
"I think there’s a place for off-grid or behind-the-meter solutions for data centers where they’re directly responsible for the cost of building out infrastructure, but it will also require grid-based solutions," said Presnal.
Despite its status as the world's largest data center market, data center load in Virginia is expected to continue to grow exponentially over the remainder of the decade. In its latest earnings call, Dominion Energy - the state's major utility - reported that it had 40GW of data center load in various stages of contracting as of December 2024. This compares to 21GW in July 2024, an 88 percent increase.
In its 2024 Integrated Resource Plan, Dominion claimed that at least 80 percent of its new generation capacity would come from low-carbon sources. However, with the current US administration backing fossil fuel developments in favor of carbon-free alternatives, it seems likely that natural gas will play a significant role in powering new data center capacity going forward.
