KERMIT, Texas — It’s longer than the width of Rhode Island, snakes across the oil fields of the southwest U.S. and crawls at 10 mph – too slow for a truck and too long for a train.
It’s a new sight: the longest conveyer belt in America.
Atlas Energy Solutions, a Texas-based oil field company, has installed a 42-mile long (67 kilometers) conveyer belt to transport millions of tons of sand for hydraulic fracturing. The belt the company named “The Dune Express” runs from tiny Kermit, Texas, and across state borders into Lea County, New Mexico. Tall and lanky with lids that resemble solar modules, the steel structure could almost be mistaken for a roller coaster.
In the remote West Texas, there are few people to marvel at the unusual machine in Kermit, a city with a population of less than 6,000, where the sand is typically hauled by tractor-trailers. During fracking, liquid is pumped into the ground at a high pressure to create holes, or fractures, that release oil. The sand helps keep the holes open as water, oil and gas flow through it.
But moving the sand by truck is usually a long and potentially dangerous process, according to CEO John Turner. He said massive trucks moving sand and other industrial goods are a common site in the oil-rich Permian Basin and pose a danger to other drivers.
“Pretty early on, the delivery of sand via truck was not only inefficient, it was dangerous,” he said.
The conveyor belt, with a freight capacity of 13 tons (11.79 metric tonnes), was designed to bypass and trudge alongside traffic.
Innovation isn’t new to the oil and gas industry, nor is the idea to use a conveyor belt to move materials around. Another conveyer belt believed to be the world’s longest conveyor — at 61 miles (98.17 kilometers) long — carries phosphorous from a mine in Western Sahara on the northwest coast of Africa, according to NASA Earth Observatory.
When moving sand by truck became a nuisance, an unprecedented and risky investment opportunity arose: constructing a $400 million machine to streamline the production of hydraulic fracturing. The company went public in March 2023, in part, to help pay for the conveyor belt and completed its first delivery in January, Turner said.
The sand sits in a tray-shaped pan with a lid that can be taken off at any point, but most of the it gets offloaded into silos near the Texas and New Mexico border. Along its miles-long journey, the sand is sold and sent to fracking companies who move it by truck for…
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