The World’s Second-Longest Conveyor Belt Comes to West Texas

I rapped my knuckles on the galvanized aluminum exterior to make sure it wasn’t some sort of desert mirage. It was solid: $400 million worth of concrete, electronics, and steel assembled to rotate a thick rubber belt along roughly 66,000 metal rollers. Something on the order of 13 million tons of sand can be carried the entire length of the machine—42 miles—each year. If all of that were used to build sandcastles, you could have a couple of dozen the size of Buckingham Palace, with more than enough left over for a Taj Mahal.

But this sand isn’t for beachside amusement. It’s for fracking. When drillers crack open subterranean rock in the Permian Basin to allow oil to flow out, sand rides alongside the injected fluid to prevent the spider’s web of new fractures from closing up again. Each grain of sand functions like a tiny support beam in a minuscule mine shaft. Fracking a single well can consume more than four hundred truckloads of sand.

This gluttonous appetite has created problems in West Texas. Ranchers accustomed to driving wide-open tarmac have had to contend with roads packed with eighteen-wheelers guzzling diesel and belching emissions. “Staying alive on 285” is a macabre yet common expression among locals regarding the often deadly two-lane highway that connects Pecos to Carlsbad, New Mexico. And for frackers, finding enough drivers with commercial licenses to haul all that sand is an expensive challenge.

This situation birthed the Dune Express, the massive conveyor belt that starts about ten miles northeast of the oil field outpost of Kermit and extends west by northwest into New Mexico. Austin-based Atlas Energy Solutions invested a king’s ransom in a fix that it believes will prove more profitable than trucking sand to customers. If it succeeds, it will have dug itself an economic moat against would-be competitors. If it fails, it will have to endure industry mockery for its seemingly Rube Goldbergian efforts.

Construction began in early 2023 and was nearly complete when I visited late this past October. Kenny Whitehead, the senior project manager for Atlas, faced a weeks-long list of tasks his team had to complete before full operations could start early this year. Whitehead is burly, with a large red beard and red hair, like some Viking who got lost and ended up in West Texas. He “did a lot of destructive testing” on the rubber used in the belt, which was manufactured in China; he “took it to a firing range and shot a lot of calibers at it.” The belt—three-quarters of an inch thick, strengthened by internal steel cables, and three feet wide—remained structurally sound after being pierced by .22-, .38-, and .45-caliber bullets. It took a .50-caliber to rend it.

The Dune Express is believed to be the second-longest conveyor belt in the world. In Western Sahara, a territory controlled by Morocco, a belt carries phosphate more than sixty miles from the Bou Craa mine to the coast. It’s one of the few man-made structures visible from space. Luke Patti, a heavily tattooed operations manager for Atlas, was recruited from Western Australia, where he worked on a twelve-mile-long belt that transports iron ore. I asked him whether he’d seen any other long belts back home. “There are a few, but none as impressive as this,” he told me in his Aussie twang.

Atlas mines its sand—a variety with small, round particles—from an expanse of rolling dunes near Kermit that reach thirty feet tall, with deposits extending eighty feet below the surface. “We’re going to run out of oil before we run out of sand,” said Kyle Turlington, the company’s vice president of investor relations. The water table in some portions of this area lies only five feet below the surface, which allowed Atlas to create a five-acre lagoon and import a dredging boat to far West Texas. “It is kind of strange to see a dredge in the desert,” said Chris McCravey, the senior plant manager, as we toured the mine. Carp and salamanders live in the landlocked pond, likely born from eggs that hitched a ride on visiting waterfowl.

A cutting bit extending underwater from the barge churns into the sand and sucks it up in a slurry that is piped to a nearby plant, where it is separated from clay constituents, cleaned, and dried. Once it’s piled on the five-foot-high belt, the sand will travel at a leisurely 10 miles per hour. Rollers spaced every sixteen feet hold the belt in place, beneath an aluminum cover that prevents the wind from blowing the sand off. The conveyor’s terminal end lies in the heart of the Delaware Basin, a part of the Permian where most of the new wells are drilled these days and where demand for sand is high. There it’s stored in six large silos, each capable of holding five thousand tons. Atlas has ordered two autonomous trucks from Kodiak Robotics to deliver the sand from the silos, along private ranch roads, to the well pads.

Along its route, the conveyor burrows through twenty thick cement culverts that allow ranchers, in their Polaris four-wheelers, to motor over it. Animals can pass underneath the contraption. In most places, there’s only two and a half feet of clearance beneath the belt, but nineteen elevated stretches allow cattle, coyotes, javelinas, and mule deer to move about unobstructed. It also climbs over five highways, reaching as high as 25 feet. At Monument Draw, cement columns stretch 40 feet into the ground and raise the belt 20 feet above it—high enough to stay out of the way of a hundred-year flood. In other words, the Dune Express is built to last.

Atlas Energy was founded in 2017, but its roots extend back to the seventies, when Bud Brigham, Steve Cole, and Hal Rasmussen were students at Midland High School. All three would end up in the oil-and-gas exploration business.

In 2016 Rasmussen, a petroleum engineer, was drilling wells northwest of Kermit and tired of driving home to Midland on the main road, where accidents were routine. “The traffic was just terrible,” he said. “It was a death trap.” The previous year the fatality rate on roads in the Texas Department of Transportation’s Odessa district—which includes Winkler County, home of Kermit—was the highest among the state’s 25 districts and twice the state average.

One Saturday, Rasmussen oversaw the fracking of a well using sand brought in by train from Wisconsin, whose product was then the industry standard. On his way home, he drove the back roads and was floored to pass soaring dunes. He got out and filled a Styrofoam cup with sand. Then he drove back to the well he had just fracked and filled another cup with leftover Wisconsin sand. At his Midland office, he examined both under a magnifying glass and didn’t see much difference. The following Monday, he showed both cups to his partner, Cole.

What’s the difference? Rasmussen asked. They look identical, Cole conceded, but there must be some reason generations of Texas drillers had opted to order sand from Wisconsin even as they routinely drove past the local dunes. “Surely all of those guys weren’t so stupid,” Cole said.

Others at their company shared similar doubts, but to appease Rasmussen and satisfy his own curiosity, Cole agreed to pay $10,000 to a Houston laboratory to run a battery of tests on the local sand. The results were extraordinary. The Texas grains were spherical, the right size, and held up well under pressure. They were as good for fracking as the Wisconsin sands.

Cole and Rasmussen began to acquire leases on as many of the dunes as they could. Then they called up their old high school classmate to see if he was interested in joining them. By then Brigham was an extraordinarily successful entrepreneur. He had taken Brigham Exploration public and eventually sold it to a Norwegian energy firm for $4.4 billion. He later started another oil-and-gas company that he would sell for $2.6 billion. The three old friends struck a deal, and Atlas Energy was born. In 2023 it went public on the New York Stock Exchange, where it’s valued at more than $2.3 billion. Brigham is the executive chairman, while Cole and Rasmussen remain large shareholders.

With enough sand to frack Permian wells into the twenty-second century, Brigham and his team brainstormed ways to get it to customers that avoided the dangerous downsides of trucking and could give them a competitive advantage over the roughly twenty other Texas sand mines that had sprung up in the wake of Rasmussen’s discovery. They considered a swarm of drones, helicopters hauling buckets, and a pipeline carrying a sand-and-water slurry. But a conveyor belt was deemed the least expensive and most reliable option.

Kurt Hallead, an energy analyst with the Benchmark Company, put a “buy” rating on Atlas stock because of the Dune Express, which he describes as similar to a vascular artery, capable of delivering sand quickly and cheaply to oil drillers. Hallead told me he started out as a skeptic. “There’s no way,” he said when he first heard the conveyor belt idea. “How is that even feasible?” Now he believes Atlas will deliver sand at a significantly lower cost than competitors.

Such early doubt may have been a competitive advantage for Atlas. “It was one of the reasons no one stepped up to compete with us. They didn’t believe it could be done,” said Brigham when I visited him in his corporate offices near Lake Austin. There was sand, subtly, all over, from the small Zen gardens on conference tables to the shuffleboard court in the break room. Next to the reception desk a statue of Atlas holding a globe sat on a bed of sand. Nearby was a copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, a 1957 novel about heroic capitalists triumphing over soulless regulators, which inspired the company name. (Brigham also financially backed two film adaptations of the book.) On his walls were quotes from Rand and hand-signed notes from Donald Trump.

Spending $400 million on a conveyor belt to ship sand across a desert seems audacious on its face. But is it any crazier than delivering sand on a train from 1,300 miles away? Or building a network of buried pipes to move oil, gas, and now water across the sprawling Permian Basin? Seen through this lens, the Dune Express is rational, even reasonable. As the oil business innovates, West Texas is its sandbox.

This article originally appeared in the February 2025 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “Against the Grain.” Subscribe today.