Williams is in the pre-filing phase for potentially building a roughly 260-mile line starting in West Virginia and ending at a compressor station in Peach Bottom Township. There, it would connect to the Transco Pipeline, spokesman Chris Stockton said.

The Transco line was built in the early 1950s and brings natural gas north from the Gulf of Mexico to major U.S. population centers, he said.

The 10,000-mile pipeline Williams owns and operates under its Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line Co. subsidiary provides about half of the natural gas used in New York City and New Jersey and about a third of the gas used in Pennsylvania, Stockton said.

Williams owns about 15,000 miles of transmission lines across the country.

The Atlantic Access Project to connect Marcellus Shale areas in West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania with the Transco and, therefore, to major markets also would fall under this subsidiary, he said.

The project remains in the early stages, Stockton said.

"We are still about a year away from (submitting plans for approval)," he said. "We are still in the information-gathering, due diligence phase."

Projects such as this one are relatively new endeavors, according to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, known as FERC.

The first Marcellus Shale pipeline proposal did not come across its desks until 2008, said Tamara Young-Allen, commission spokeswoman for oil and natural gas issues.

The line would not just be an economic boon for producers, distributors and end users, she said. The company would pay property taxes on the line, which likely will attract other business developments, Stockton said.

The closer a manufacturer or other business is to a natural gas hookup, the less expensive it can be to hook up and take advantage of it as a fuel, he said.

Natural gas prices are determined by the costs at the wellhead and the transportation costs, said David N. Taylor, executive director of the Pennsylvania Manufacturers' Association.

So any way to cut costs on the transportation side, including having the gas coming from Pennsylvania and not elsewhere in the country, is a boon for business, he said.

Taylor also said he would expect businesses to seek to set up shop near transmission lines for a similar reason: The distance between themselves and a significant natural gas supply is cut down.

"It all comes down to the cost of doing business," he said.

Williams began survey work last summer to possibly build a bridge from Marcellus regions, including determining where exactly to put the line, he said.

From an engineering and geographic standpoint, it makes sense to establish the connection in southern York County, which hosts one of many compressor stations that help push the gas to its final destinations, Stockton said.

If everything goes according to plan, Williams hopes to have the line in service by the end of 2014, he said.

The timetable would require the company to formally submit plans to FERC by late fall, successfully navigate the approvals process that takes about a year and then build the line, he said.

Moving forward with the roughly $1 billion project also would require commitments from natural gas buyers, Stockton said.

Even the size of the piping has yet to be determined, he said. The company does not want to pay for a line that ends up running relatively empty because demand for gas is not large enough, Stockton said.

Williams previously had looked into building a feeder line leading into Peach Bottom Township several years ago — it would have started in Ohio to help bring gas from the Rocky Mountain region to the Northeast — but interest from buyers was not adequate, he said.

Williams recently split into two companies, effectively spinning off its exploration and production business unit into its own company, WPX Energy Inc., to focus on transmission infrastructure and connecting production areas to transmission lines, Stockton said.

He compared transmission lines with toll roads; other entities pay to use the toll road, and it needs to be cost effective to ship products on the roadway.

The closer production is to the end user, the lower the cost, which helps the line's economic outlook this time around, Stockton said. It augments the fact that brand-new drilling areas need new transmission lines built to them, he said.

"It's right in the market's backyard," Stockton said.