It was 1 a.m. on Sept. 14, 2021, and Sean Jamieson was up.
For the previous two months, the general counsel of Spire Inc.’s midstream and commodity businesses had been up most nights after a federal appeals court ordered the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to revoke the operating permit on Spire’s 65-mile STL Pipeline. The pipeline, which runs from Illinois to eastern Missouri and is a major source of natural gas for the St. Louis area, and the revocation posed an existential question for the company: How would Spire keep its customers warm come winter?
The STL Pipeline had been a controversial project from the beginning — and a litigious one at that. Environmentalists were displeased that federal regulators had authorized yet another natural gas pipeline. Landowners on the pipeline route were upset over their lost or damaged property. And now, a court was unamused that the Trump-era FERC ever approved the pipeline project to begin with.
It’s fair to say that the bet-the-company nature of the issue would ruin the sleep of any GC in the midstream industry. But Jamieson’s panic ran deeper over a problem that the government and environmental organizations didn’t seem to understand: Per U.S. Census data, Jamieson knew that 47 percent of St. Louis’ population is African American and 23 percent lives below the poverty line. And a shutdown of this $287 million natural gas pipeline would put much of St. Louis’ most vulnerable populations in danger.
“The pipeline was designed to bring diverse energy supply to the St. Louis region — meaning that gas transported on the pipeline kept energy prices low for customers while reducing energy insecurity concerns for our most vulnerable populations,” Jamieson said.
So, when the Biden administration chose to grant the STL Pipeline a 90-day extension at 1 a.m. on Sept. 14 to keep the pipeline in operation temporarily, a profound sense of relief swept through Jamieson. He still gets emotional thinking about it.
“I was up because this [was] not about business,” he said. “This would have been bad for our business, there’s no question about that. But it would have been terrible for people. I had spent the months before working with the technical analysts and modeling what it would mean if we didn’t have this pipeline, the number of customers we would potentially lose.”
“I learned and internalized all the mechanics associated with what would actually happen.”
The stakes felt especially high since the regulatory battle occurred on the heels of Winter Storm Uri, which killed 246 people in Texas as unprecedented freezing temperatures and a stressed power grid produced days of rolling blackouts across the state.
“We were not accustomed to not having the energy we needed,” Jamieson said. “When we didn’t have the energy that we needed to keep ourselves warm or cook for our families, it meant that there was high anxiety and people resorted to tactics that were not helpful to them. It’s quite remarkable to think that the No. 1 cause of death during that time was not actually people freezing to death. It was people who had died from carbon monoxide poisoning. People were resorting to desperate measures.”
Over the next year and a half, Jamieson was the man behind the curtain at Spire who oversaw all the pipeline project’s legal and regulatory matters (which spanned three federal district courts, one federal appellate court, the nation’s high court and the FERC) while also serving as the public-facing representative of Spire who talked to numerous reporters, advocated on Capitol Hill, engaged with the company’s stakeholders and talked with members of the St. Louis community.
Jamieson’s efforts paid off when, after 16 months of re-evaluation, FERC decided to re-authorize the STL Pipeline’s operating permit.
The Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook have named Jamieson one of three finalists for the 2024 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Achievement in Diversity and Inclusion. The finalists will be honored and winners announced at an awards ceremony on Wednesday.
Lawyers who know Jamieson say it is his commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion that allows him to pull off monumental successes like these.
“Sean attributes much of his career success in navigating companies through often uncharted territory to his diversity of ideas, backgrounds, experiences and perspectives, and for curating a team that reflects the same,” Vinson & Elkins partner Quentin Smith said in nominating Jamieson for the award. “His experience has taught him that the convergence of these diverse ideas results in better corporate decision-making and reduced execution risk.”
When it comes to staffing outside lawyers on matters, Smith said Jamieson also thinks creatively — even when he doesn’t have a very diverse pool to draw from.
“There are only so many people that do FERC, projects or antitrust work,” Smith said. “You’re not always going to find a diverse person that also has experience in the field. With that said, Sean finds other opportunities to get diverse people involved and considered. He’s great at expanding roles within their firms and externally with those [client] relationships.”
Smith says one way he does this is by ensuring that the relationship partners at his outside firms are diverse.
“He has helped a lot of people, including me, advance in their careers because he’s supported people like me,” Smith said. “At the end of the day, what firms care about is what you (as the partner) can do for the firm. He’s still supporting a bunch of diverse people throughout the country in his role while still meeting all the goals that the business requires of him.”
Morgan Lewis partner Kirstin Gibbs has had a similar experience working with Jamieson. As a client, she said Jamieson also challenges the way she thinks about diversity and inclusion.
“Being a woman growing up in the oil and gas practice area, which was heavily male-dominated until recently … I’ve always been selfishly focused on that because I do think of women as diverse,” said Gibbs, co-leader of Morgan Lewis’ energy industry team.”
Gibbs said Jamieson helped her better understand the need to explore diversity on a deeper level “to make sure I was touching base with the diverse associates to make sure they really were OK. Sometimes I think, ‘Oh they’re getting work, they seem fine, they seem happy,’ but it’s really about asking them about any challenges or struggles they might have [to foster] a deeper connection of mentorship and support.”
Jamieson was born and raised in the suburbs of New York City. His mother is a retired school superintendent. His father owned and managed a real estate development company with holdings primarily in Manhattan and the Bronx.
While no one in Jamieson’s immediate family was a lawyer, his dad’s best friends — Jamieson’s godparents — were. One was a solo practitioner and the other was general counsel at ITT. An older cousin, who Jamieson looked up to, was also a lawyer. Jamieson credited all three for having a “profound influence” on his decision to go to law school.
In high school, Jamieson met another influence for his future when he interned for George Shebitz, a prominent constitutional lawyer and a board member at his school.
“I think that experience has never left me — the interest that the took in me and how I felt when he told me that I had every opportunity to do the same thing,” Jamieson said.
Jamieson attended George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where he studied international affairs, international economics and international politics. In high school, Jamieson took an interest in linguistics — studying Spanish, Latin and French — and continued French in college.
On Sept. 11, 2001, Jamieson was back home in New York running errands as he prepared to leave for France the following day to study abroad when two planes struck the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Jamieson’s stepfather worked in one of the buildings but, fortunately, was not at work that day.
“I remember vividly that day — running errands, getting ready to leave for study abroad, and realizing that something was happening,” Jamieson said. “We were stunned. Being stunned, being shocked … turned into a moment for us to come together, a moment for us to think about how we can help our neighbors in their grief, their concerns, their anxiety, the pain that people were feeling.”
“A lot of my experiences have informed who I am and what I do, and so I think about the kind of collaboration that we needed to become a better community,” Jamieson added. “That worked. That’s when New Yorkers — [and] Americans — were at their best. We believed that we needed to help each other [in] whatever way we could.”
Like other major life events, Jamieson said the 9/11 tragedy has deeply affected how he views crises and how he makes decisions today as a business leader.
“I have deep concerns when people have anxiety about things because it means that they could resort to tactics that are not helpful to themselves or others,” he said. “How do we avoid that? We need to be proactive about our engagement across stakeholders. That’s what I bring to the businesses where I am now — the proactive engagement. Engaging with people who both disagree with what we do and agree with what we do.”
Developing a niche
Jamieson stayed in Washington for law school and got his J.D. from Howard University School of Law. After clerkships with the U.S. International Trade Commission (for Irving Williamson, now chairman) and Squire Patton Boggs, Jamieson began his legal career as an associate in D.C. at Van Ness Feldman, an energy boutique law firm that handles natural gas and electric energy regulatory work. He spent five years there doing project development work for pipelines and transmission developers, which also included rate-making associated with the FERC, as well as advising electric companies during FERC investigations.
From there, Jamieson moved to Morgan Lewis, where he worked on energy M&A transactions and represented energy traders on the regulatory side in “a lot of marquee kind of allegations of market manipulation.”
Jamieson’s work at Morgan Lewis brought him to Houston frequently, so he began thinking about moving there.
“I realized that it was Houston that was the center of the energy industry,” he said. “I wanted to join an in-house team to better understand how businesses execute on their growth strategies, how they mitigate risks and how they respond in a crisis.”
An opportunity at Cheniere Energy became available for someone with Jamieson’s skillset and experience, and Jamieson spent the next three years as principal counsel for Cheniere’s trading business.
At Cheniere, Jamieson helped scale Cheniere’s natural gas trading business and built programs to ensure continued compliance as that business grew. A year after joining, Jamieson became Cheniere’s head of global compliance, charged with developing the company’s corporate compliance programs worldwide. He also was in charge of privacy as well as compliance for Cheniere’s three U.S. interstate natural gas pipelines.
Jamieson departed Cheniere at the end of 2017 as managing counsel of the commodities and regulatory legal team. At the time Cheniere was undergoing a major cultural shift after ousting its founding CEO, Charif Souki, at the end of 2015 amid a shareholder activism battle driven by Carl Icahn. In 2018, Jamieson joined Spire.
“What I really liked about Cheniere was that we were in fast growth mode all the time, and I moved over to Spire and it was the exact same thing,” Jamieson said, plus “the role was to be a general counsel, which is something I wanted.”
Primarily a utility company, St. Louis-based Spire serves more than 1.7 million residential customers and businesses in Missouri, Alabama and Mississippi. Spire also has a Houston-based leadership team, including Jamieson, that is responsible for the natural gas-related businesses it owns that serve commercial customers: interstate pipelines, intrastate pipelines, natural gas storage and commodities trading. Those businesses comprise two companies: Spire Marketing (commodities trading) and Spire Midstream (pipeline services/natural gas storage).
At the time Jamieson joined, Spire was in the beginning stages of building its midstream infrastructure business, so the opportunity to work in that segment of the energy sector, in addition to commodities trading, was attractive to him. He said he was also drawn by Spire’s ethos — delivering reliable energy and growing the business while remaining committed to regulatory compliance and doing the right thing.
As general counsel of Spire Marketing and Spire Midstream, Jamieson oversees the legal affairs of those businesses, is responsible for compliance — predominantly FERC — and ensures that everything Spire does helps the company achieve its business objectives. He is also vice president of federal affairs for the entire umbrella of Spire companies, a role that involves advocating for the company before federal and congressional officials and federal agencies.
Over the years, Jamieson has increasingly spent more of his time engaging with stakeholders, which he considers to be a broader class than stockholders: landowners, local officials, community groups and elected officials in Washington. He also views environmental groups as stakeholders — including the Environmental Defense Fund, which brought the STL Pipeline litigation that struck to the core of Jamieson’s passion and philosophy on diversity, equity and inclusion.
Winter is coming
Environmental groups, including EDF, had appealed the approval of STL Pipeline’s permit, issued by FERC in 2018, on arguments that FERC (during the Trump administration) gave the project the green light without adequately investigating whether there was truly a commercial need for it. Instead they alleged that Spire built the pipeline with a self-dealing motivation since Spire’s only buyer from the pipeline was essentially the utility side of its business. So that’s one factor the D.C. Circuit tasked FERC with evaluating when it vacated Spire’s permit and remanded it for a re-review.
But Jamieson said Spire actually built the pipeline to diversify natural gas sources to the area, reducing costs to end users. Before the STL Pipeline, 90 percent of St. Louis’ energy sourcing came from Texas and Oklahoma, Jamieson said, which was more expensive due to the growing demand for liquefied natural gas exports from the Gulf Coast. The STL Pipeline sources natural gas from cheaper areas, including Appalachia and the Rockies.
“The infinite wisdom of my colleagues was that we need to diversify our energy source in order to balance out higher-cost molecules that are coming from Texas and Oklahoma as a result of the growth of the LNG industry,” Jamieson said. “I knew that the LNG industry was growing from the demand to deliver gas around the world. There are so many positive things about LNG exports, but what it does mean is that it makes gas more competitive and therefore more expensive for consumption in the United States.”
Early on in Spire and EDF’s legal battle, a freak winter storm hit Texas in February 2021 that emphasized Spire’s point. In the past, when a winter storm would hit Texas — say, San Antonio — endless memes would permeate Twitter ridiculing the ‘impact’: a tipped over fold-up chair amidst a thin layer of sleet. But Winter Storm Uri was unprecedented. Inches of snow blanketed the entire state of Texas, the pristine, car-less roads resembling pathways to national parks more than interstate highways. But as the sublimity of nature demonstrates, the beauty came with a price: days of freezing temperatures and lingering ice put all 254 counties into a state of emergency as the power grid failed and natural gas production significantly declined. Hundreds died.
“No one could foresee that gas production would go offline and that gas would be significantly reduced in Texas and Oklahoma,” Jamieson said. “In the state of Texas, the governor said no gas could be exported from the state before it was first offered for use within the state. Makes perfect sense to me, but it also meant that people who were relying on gas coming from Texas were in a worse off position.”
“Spire’s STL Pipeline came to the rescue,” he added. “It did exactly what it was supposed to do, which is why at the time when we were in a fight against the Environmental Defense Fund about the need for the pipeline it was shocking to me for people to not immediately understand the value … of what it did. But none of that really mattered. What mattered was how are we going to provide reliable and affordable energy sources to customers?”
By the time the D.C. Circuit issued its June 22 order, the STL Pipeline had been delivering natural gas to customers in the St. Louis area for two years. As a major natural gas pipeline that provided 40 percent of St. Louis’ natural gas, this became a huge problem for Spire come winter, when furnaces in roughly 400,000 homes and businesses would no longer have the pipeline as a source for heat.
“The problem with shutting down the pipeline meant that the St. Louis region would become vulnerable overnight to loss of energy should temperatures drop to 9 degrees,” Jamieson said. “If you have to unreliably serve someone and gas gets shut off, it’s not like … electricity [where] it flickers for a little bit and comes back on. A natural gas certified technician has to go to your house to reconnect your gas, so it safely enters your home and does not cause any explosions. The worst-case scenario would be a massive effort to reconnect that. That’s not happening in days. That’s weeks.”
Beyond jeopardizing reliable gas service to major industrial plants such as General Motors, Anheuser-Busch and the St. Louis Metropolitan Sewer District, Jamieson said, it also meant that it put retail customers at risk. Again, 47 percent of the St. Louis population is African American and 23 percent lives below the poverty line. And as Winter Storm Uri demonstrated, those hardest hit in nearly any loss of services are the poor.
“That’s the part that personally tore me apart,” Jamieson said. “I could not look an elderly person on fixed income in the eye without knowing that I did everything I could to keep them warm at affordable costs. And I thought about the responsibility my company had (and has) to deliver energy at the lowest cost possible for our lower-income populations that live paycheck to paycheck.”
By the time FERC issued the temporary emergency certificate, Jamieson had already assembled a massive high-profile legal team, which came to include Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher’s Eugene Scalia and former U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson. The object now was to regain permitting for the STL Pipeline beyond the new Dec. 13 deadline.
“[For] the entire legal team and the government relations team … there was no sleep during that time,” Jamieson said. “Immediately the team jumped on a call and we were discussing what it meant.”
As the Dec. 13 deadline approached, Jamieson flew to Washington.
“Things were getting really dire at this point,” Jamieson said. “We provided all the information to the regulatory agency. I know they’re engaged in a review of this. I was meeting with people in Washington to try to get more senators behind us to support this effort and to advocate on our behalf.”
It was in one of those meetings that Jamieson learned that FERC granted another temporary permit. This time, FERC extended the permit for a longer period that was good until it decided on the issues the D.C. Circuit remanded to it — in other words, while it re-considered Spire’s pending application and all the voices in favor of or opposed to the STL Pipeline.
‘Republicans could not fix this’
In the C-suites at Spire, Jamieson found himself fighting the conventional view of how to resolve the issue. The conventional view? “Get a Republican to help you,” Jamieson said. He knew it wouldn’t work.
“That view did not reflect diverse perspectives on what was happening in the political world at the time,” Jamieson said. “It was a very unique period for fossil fuels and projects that were authorized in the prior administration. I knew things were going to be challenging … so it meant that we had to double down on our communication. And it meant that we had to talk to people and listen to people in ways that maybe we’ve done before, but we needed to do a better job.”
“Republicans could not fix this,” Jamieson said. “We needed to find Democrats that were going to speak to Democrats, and that meant finding the community to speak to Democrats.”
Jamieson said his colleagues were initially hesitant about his approach because they were afraid of what the community would have to say.
“I was not though,” he said. “Because of my experiences, I know that people feel energy is important to them and that they shouldn’t have to have a change because of a new agenda that’s being pushed.”
Premium Subscriber Q&A: Sean Jamieson shares his thoughts on effective diversity and inclusion initiatives the legal industry can be engaging in, what outside counsel needs to know about him and what he perceives as the biggest challenges when it comes to DEI.
Beyond talking to folks in Washington, Jamieson did something many in-house lawyers at oil and gas companies would find abhorrent: He talked to reporters. A lot of reporters. TV stations, publications, you name it — if one were to Google the STL Pipeline at that time, Jamieson, as the face of Spire, would be front and center.
It wasn’t necessarily positive press, either. One story highlighted a hardware store owner’s befuddlement over the record amount of electric space heaters customers were frantically purchasing in the middle of summer in response to Spire’s warnings that customers may not have heat in the winter. Another highlighted EDF’s response to Spire’s repeated communications with customers, calling them false and defamatory.
Ultimately, it was Spire and Jamieson’s boots-on-the-ground conversations with members of the St. Louis community that appeared to provide a breakthrough in the FERC battle.
While talking with everyday people — including the elderly and disabled, minority customers and businesses and low-income families — Jamieson learned that people worry about the growing cost of their utility bills. He learned all they really cared about was that their energy was reliable and affordable.
“I can think of countless stories of elderly people who are like, ‘Well, I don’t really want to turn the heat up too much even though I’m freezing because I’m more worried about my energy bill,’” he said. “I don’t want [people] ever deciding between turning up the heat to stay warm in their home or being cold in their home and causing more health problems for themselves.”
“When I think about the national dialogue about whether we build more pipelines or whether we stop pipelines and entirely convert to something renewable,” Jamieson said, “what’s missing from that national discussion is the impact it has on lower-income communities. Lower-income communities also should be entitled to the energy they need at affordable costs because the decision of whether to heat their homes for their families or pay exorbitantly high energy costs — in my opinion, and I know I’m biased — is the difference between having natural gas or not.”
As numerous parties weighed in with FERC on their opinions about the STL Pipeline, members of the community were among those voices.
“It became very clear what they wanted, and what they wanted was natural gas,” Jamieson said. “It wasn’t just the labor unions who were united in their voice. It wasn’t just community groups like the Urban League or the NAACP or the Clergy Coalition of St. Louis. … It was also citizens.”
“One comment that came to mind was someone from Missouri who took the time to write in to a federal agency — no one wants to do that, but they took the time — and said, ‘Look, this pipeline has been built. It has been serving this region. People are tired of politics.”
“Energy should not be a political issue. It is a human right,” Jamieson said.
Days before the start of the following winter, at a public FERC meeting on Dec. 15, 2022, the agency decided to reauthorize the pipeline project.
Troutman Pepper partner Daniel Archuleta, a member of Spire’s legal team who was at the public FERC hearing, said Jamieson was “uniquely qualified” to handle a crisis like this one and get the result that Spire did.
“Sean was very, very good at looking at the bigger picture [and] getting moving pieces organized in a very short period of time,” Archuleta said. “Staying focused on the ultimate goal in terms of providing reliable and affordable service helped Sean help us stay focused regardless of [external] criticism.”
Jamieson’s best day on the job was the day FERC re-issued Spire’s permit for the STL Pipeline.
“It was the most meaningful moment in my career because I realized the crisis was averted — our customers would have the energy they needed to stay warm that winter,” he said. “Families across the region could continue to heat their homes, cook on their stoves and avoid the tragedy so many experienced in Texas during the Winter Storm Uri crisis.”