It looks a bit like a West Texas desert mirage stretching out for miles as far as the eye can see – some 42 miles from the far West Texas town of Kermit, Northwest into New Mexico like a giant mammoth snake undulating over desolate roads and dunes in a scattered petroleum infrastructure.
It has a name – the Dune Express – and it is, in effect, a giant conveyor belt designed to carry tons of sand. It’s a structure believed to be the largest conveyor belt in the world, second only to a similar setup in Morocco.
How did it get there and what is it doing exactly?
Russell Gold of Texas Monthly had many questions about this and the answers he found made for an amazing story. He joined Texas Standard with the details. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Let’s talk about that massive conveyor belt you describe. You write that it seems a bit like a Rube Goldberg machine, a crazy idea from the get-go. Who built this and why?
Russell Gold: When I first heard about it, I thought someone was making a joke. You know – who would build a 40-mile conveyor belt through West Texas?
But the answer is it’s a company called Atlas Energy Solutions. They’re based here in Austin, and they are there in the sand business. They deliver sand to wells.
And if listeners are trying to figure out why you would need sand in an oil and gas well, the answer is that without sand, you know, you can frack a well and it will just close up again. We use sand to prop open the wells.
And so, every new Permian well uses something like 400 truckloads of sand. There’s a lot of sand being moved around the Permian Basin.
And that’s a big conveyor belt. How long has it been out there and how long did it take to build that thing?
It took about 18 months to build and it’s been out and operational for really about 2 or 3 weeks now. Just really got commissioned in early 2025. It’s the shiny new piece of infrastructure out in West Texas.
And, you know, it starts right outside of Kermit in this large area of sand dunes. And they put the sand on the conveyor belt and it gets delivered up into New Mexico. There’s one stop along the way. And then, amazingly enough, up in New Mexico it goes into silos and now they’re using driverless trucks to deliver them on private ranch roads to the wells.
So it’s this very bizarre automated system out in the Permian to move sand around.
So you’re moving sand from the Permian in West Texas to New Mexico. What do they do with the sand out there? How does that fit into the oil business?
Sure. Well, I mean, the Permian extends up into New Mexico. We sort of think of the Permian Basin as Texas, but it covers a large part of two counties up in New Mexico.
So the sand is being moved up into New Mexico where there are a lot of new wells being drilled. And every time companies to go out, they’ll drill the wells, they’ll drill down vertically and then turn horizontally through the shale.
And then what they do is… You know, people have heard of the expression “to frack a well.” Well, “fracking a well” means basically pumping in a huge amount of water with sand and it creates a fracture network and the sand gets shot out there with the water, the water is drained out and the sand settles and remains and it holds open the cracks, the fracture they created. And that’s where the oil drains out of.
But at what price for this contraption? I mean, $400 million. Does that make economic sense?
You know, it would seem like it wouldn’t. But I talked to some Wall Street investors, because Atlas Energy is a public company and they are looking at this, trying to figure out, is this a good bet?
Everyone seems like thinking that this is a really good long-term bet because they’re able to deliver sand at a much lower cost. The alternative is to put it on trucks. And, you know, it’s hard to find trucks. It’s hard to find drivers. People with CDL licenses out there are hard to come by.
So it actually is much cheaper to deliver sand with this new conveyor belt, even with the $400 million price tag, because they’re sort of going to be the only game in town and it’s either them or expensive trucks. So they think they’ve built a moat around their business and they’re going to be a dominant sand player for years to come.
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But I bet there are a lot of frustrated and angry truckers, too.
Truckers in West Texas in the Permian Basin are not short of jobs. There are plenty of jobs for truckers – whether it’s moving sand or moving oil or moving equipment. There was a shortage of truckers and truck drivers, generally speaking, so I’m not sure… They’ll stay angry as long as it takes to find a new job.
Well, what about other locals? I mean, I could imagine this bifurcating the ecosystem. What about the animals? That sort of thing?
Well, I’m glad you asked that. They built, I forget, about a dozen different places where the conveyor belt goes up and over and allows for javelinas, mule deer, even cattle – you know, because these are ranching operations – to cross under. So they’ve sort of taken into account the movement, the migration of animals.
And, you know, the other locals, the human kind, are quite happy because these are old ranch roads that are not used to congestion. You go out there, driving around places in West Texas, and there’s just trucks everywhere. And this is going to take thousands of trucks off the road and make moving around West Texas a little safer and a little more convenient.
Real briefly, do you think this is a long-term solution or are we going to see an abandoned carcass sitting out there in a few years time? What do you think?
You know, they have, believe it or not, 75 years worth of sand in these sand dunes where they start. And as one of the investor relations manager of Atlas Energy quipped to me, he said, “you know, we might run out of oil before we run out of sand.”
No, I don’t think this is just going to be abandoned out there.