SCANA's V.C. Summer Nuclear Plant, located about 30 miles north of Columbia near Jenkinsville, has 1,000 megawatts of generating capacity. Photo courtesy of SCANACorp.

Quoted in The Charlotte Observer last Friday, Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers said, "My judgment is that if you look out five to 10 years, Duke is going to be one of the mega-companies in America supplying power to this country." Merged with Ohio-based Cinergy Corporation last year, Duke and its $70 billion in assets is America's largest utility. But now Duke is about to spin off its natural gas business.

For stockholders the spin-off means the shares of the gas business and the shares of the electricity business will each be more valuable. Each will become a "pure play" as opposed to the current Duke energy superstore. The stock market places more value on the pure play.

Getting to the pure play, Duke recently sold its marketing units and trading operations. On the other hand, it's highly profitable real estate business, Crescent Resources, is set to stay inside Duke Energy.

The gas spin-off will be headquartered in Houston and, for now, will be called Gas Co. It has 1.7 million gas customers. It will handle natural gas pipelines and processing. A Canadian natural gas utility will be part of Gas Co. The spin-off is expected to be complete by January 1.

Duke's 3.7 million customers for retail electricity include a large chunk of South Carolina's Upstate. Logically, Duke could be looking to Columbia and Charleston for expansion. In other words, SCANA could be a takeover target by Duke. SCANA has 610,000 electric power customers in South Carolina and more than one million natural gas customers in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia. In Georgia, SCANA's subsidiary is the No. 2 gas supplier. 

SCANA has $9.4 billion in assets, but SCANA is not acquiring, not expanding toomuch in the electric power business. It's electric power customer domain is locked in by Raleigh-based Progress Energy ($27 billion in assets) to the east, Atlanta-based Southern Co. ($40 billion in assets) to the west, and behemoth Duke Energy to the north.

Duke has 27,000 workers worldwide and about 10,000 in Charlotte. Should Duke come to Columbia, by then SCANA's headquarters might have relocated. It's master lease at the Palmetto Center on Main Street runs out in a few years, and its 900-employee downtown population is looking for a home.

SCANA owns 300 acres on the 12th Street Extension in Cayce, next to I-77, where two new buildings should be occupied in late 2007 by 500 employees in areas of electric and gas transmissions and support services - back-office people. The downtown headquarters contingent, however, is not looking to locate in either of the two buildings. But 300 acres allows for all kinds of further occupancy in future buildings.

Rumors of a SCANA relocation and rumors of a Duke expansion both put SCANA on the public relations spot. To handle the increasing heat, JWT Atlanta (J. Walter Thompson) was engaged last month to develop and implement marketing strategies. J. Walter Thompson is the world's fourth largest advertising firm and the modern world's oldest.