Investment bank Evercore Partners has rounded out its energy M&A advisory firm with the addition of an upstream team, complementing its existing advisory services. The new team will be led by former Scotia Waterous transaction specialists Shaun Finnie and Lance Dardis.

Evercore's Houston energy advisory is led by Rob Pacha and Ray Strong. Evercore has quickly built one of the largest energy advisory groups with 23 professionals positioned in its newly-constructed Houston office.

Finnie, previously head of U.S. mergers and acquisitions for Scotia Waterous, joined Evercore in October to lead the firm’s upstream A&D effort. Dardis, a director at Scotia, joined in September. Tim Carlson, previously a managing director at JP Morgan focused on upstream clients, will be starting in November.

Leading the A&D technical team at Evercore will be Doug Rogers and Jerry Smith, who had worked together as petroleum engineers at ExxonMobil before taking different paths into the A&D arena, only to be reunited now as Evercore’s core engineering team.

Pacha joined Evercore as the first senior managing director in the energy group coming from Bank of America Merrill Lynch in 2009, where he headed the midstream and MLP practice. Strong, previously a managing director and head of midstream and downstream in Goldman Sachs’ Natural Resources group, joined the Evercore midstream group in June of this year.

Chris Juban, previously with UBS, has also joined the energy team.

Evercore recently advised Kinder Morgan on its $38-billion acquisition of El Paso Corp., with the new upstream team handling the subsequent divestiture mandate from Kinder Morgan with respect to El Paso's E&P assets. The transaction represents the largest North American energy transaction since Exxon Mobil’s $41-billion acquisition of XTO Energy in late 2009, and the combined company will be the fourth-largest energy company in North America.

This transaction comes just four months following the announcement of Southern Union's $9.4-billion sale to Energy Transfer Equity, on which Evercore is advising Southern Union.

Evercore expects to have 30 to 40 professionals in Houston focused on energy by the end of 2012.

The advisory team is located in Evercore's new facility, which includes a state-of-the-art A&D center, in Two Houston Center in downtown Houston. Dardis can be reached at 713-427-5130, lance.dardis@evercore.com.