Williams Partners reshuffles top management

The realignment results in new leaders for the Northeast Gathering & Processing operating area and Williams' Corporate Strategic Development function. As a result, the following changes will become effective immediately:

Jim Scheel, 49, will serve as senior vice president of the Northeast Gathering & Processing operating area, with responsibility for gathering and processing business in the Marcellus and Utica shale regions.

Frank Billings, 51, will serve as senior vice president of Corporate Strategic Development, with responsibility for enterprise-level business development and customer relationship management. Billings most recently led the Northeast Gathering & Processing operating area.

Both Scheel and Billings will continue to report to Alan Armstrong, president and chief executive officer of Williams and chief executive officer of the general partner of Williams Partners.

"As the build-out of our gathering and processing business in the Marcellus-Utica advances, we're at a point where we realize the greatest value by having Northeast-region leadership with deep operational experience," said Alan Armstrong.

"Jim, in his 25 years at Williams, has been instrumental in the operations and engineering on a number of complex, large-scale projects. I'm confident in his abilities to deliver in the Northeast, where we have approximately $3.3 billion in projects underway through 2015 to increase take-away volumes and processing capacity in the Marcellus and Utica.

"Frank's work developing customer relationships opened doors to this tremendous opportunity we have in the Northeast. We look forward to having his commercial expertise, as well as his experience and leadership in strategy development, applied across the entire enterprise," said Armstrong.

"This leadership realignment represents an opportunity to realize the full value of Jim's and Frank's diverse experiences and bring new perspectives to these roles to further enhance our operating and commercial capabilities and support our One Williams vision."

Williams Partners