North Dakota’s Bakken Shale ranks as the second largest oilfield in the United States, yet for years it had no direct route to market. Kelcy Warren remembers the problem in blunt terms. “They were trucking it and railing it, which never competes with pipelines,” he says. Solving that gap became one of the defining projects of his career, and it hinged on an idea his engineering background made second nature: repurpose pipe that already existed rather than build everything new.

Turning Gas Pipe Into an Oil Highway

The Trunkline pipeline, roughly 675 miles of it, had carried natural gas for decades before Kelcy Warren’s team converted it to move crude oil. That converted stretch connected to what became the 1,170 miles Dakota Access Pipeline, now operated as the Bakken Pipeline system, with capacity to move up to 750,000 barrels of crude per day. Construction of the line, which runs from the Bakken and Three Forks production area in North Dakota to Illinois, drew heavy public controversy along the way. Commercial service finally began in 2017 after years of planning and repurposing work.

Warren also points to a related conversion. Dakota Access originally moved natural gas from the Gulf Coast north toward Chicago before Energy Transfer flipped its flow to carry crude south from the Bakken instead. “Look at the Dakota Access pipeline, it was moving natural gas from the Gulf Coast north to Chicago,” Warren says of the earlier configuration. The result took a meaningful volume of barrels off highways and rail lines, both of which Kelcy Warren says simply cannot compete with pipe on cost or safety once the infrastructure exists. For a company built on asking what the best purpose of a given pipeline might be, the Bakken project stands as one of its clearest answers. It is one of roughly a dozen repurposing projects Kelcy Warren has overseen across his career, a track record rooted in the civil engineering degree he earned at the University of Texas at Arlington. Read this article for additional information.

Learn more about Kelcy Warren on https://ir.energytransfer.com/board-member/kelcy-warren