With little fanfare and against a prevailing perception that private sector energy firms are looking warily at the West, Michigan-based CMS Energy last Wednesday announced it is opening a San Francisco office for its marketing, services and trading businesses, with a new director of western marketing operations, Laird Dyer, who was formerly with Enron and Pacific Gas Transmission in San Francisco.

“You really don’t need infrastruture any more (to be a player),” said a CMS Energy spokesperson, John Barnett.”Everything is open access, so you can move energy from one point to another through existing infrastructure.”

He noted that CMS is planning to build on its already existing presence in California through its energy services subsidiary, CMS Viron, that has a number of energy services performance contracting projects with large private- and public-sector customers in the state. The exapnded CMS energy efforts will focus will be on both natural gas and electricity products.

CMS is a partner with San Diego-based Sempra Energy in a proposed liquefied natural gas (LNG) receiving terminal in north Baja in Mexico, 60 miles south of the U.S. border.

CMS Energy marketing, services and trading businesses “have grown significantly in the past year with a geographic focus in the Midwest around our corporate asset positions,” said Tamela Pallas, president of CMS Marketing Trading. “In the past few months, we have been expanding our commodity operations to the West Coast, building upon the leadership position of our energy performance contracting subsidiary, CMS Viron Energy Services.”

With $16 billion in assets, CMS Energy now markets 600 Bcf of physical natural gas supplies annually, 3.7 Tcf for financial supplies, 37,781 gWh of electricity, 31 million barrels of oil and 9 million barrels of liquids. The company is involved in various upstream and downstream parts of the energy business, including E&P, natural gas pipelines/storage and electricity generation.

CMS hired Dyer from Enron North America where he was a director involved in gas and power transactions. Previously he worked as a strategist for the PG&E Corp. interstate natural gas transmission pipeline unit in the Northwest and before that, with Amoco Production Co. in natural gas marketing.

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