Williams' Move Sets Up Natural Gas Play

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- I've been searching for ways to expand my exposure to natural gas.

It's just a no-brainer for our energy future, even if Washington has been slow to see it. Recently, a restructuring of one of the "original" big natural gas companies, Williams(WMB) has looked mighty appealing and become an interesting opportunity.

I've been pounding the table about natural gas . The story just won't go away. While oil continues to trade close to $80 and pushes over $200 billion of American money overseas, natural gas remains a completely domestic, cheap and plentiful fuel. We have the technology now to extract it in ways that were lacking only a few short years ago, making the huge deposits in shale in the Barnett and Marcellus regions available. The U.S. has become the Saudi Arabia of natural gas.

While Washington has so far managed to ignore creating a consolidated energy policy with natural gas as its cornerstone, the logic of it will not be denied forever. Whether I scream at the top of my lungs or not, or even if Washington never gets on the natural gas bandwagon, the shift from traditional crude oil to natural gas is inevitable. It will begin with trucks and buses, and move rapidly to cars as is already happening in China.

And we have recommended all three sectors related to natural gas for 2010 -- transport and storage, oil service and E&P companies -- and seen outsized moves from all three. The trend is clearly in place, and you just can't have enough exposure to natural gas this year. I believe it is the energy opportunity of the year, if not the decade.