‘The Dune Express': Did you know Texas has a 42-mile long conveyor belt that moves sand?

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 conveyor belt in America.

Atlas Energy Solutions, a Texas-based oil field company, has installed a 42-mile conveyor belt to transport millions of tons of sand for hydraulic fracturing. The belt, which the company named “The Dune Express,” runs from tiny Kermit, Texas, 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 tractor-trailers typically haul the sand. 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.

However, according to CEO John Turner, moving the sand by truck is usually a long and potentially dangerous process. He said massive trucks moving sand and other industrial goods are a common sight 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, 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 conveyor belt believed to be the world’s longest conveyor — at 61 miles 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 hydraulic fracturing production. Turner said the company went public in March 2023, in part, to help pay for the conveyor belt and completed its first delivery in January.

AP Photo/Julio Cortez

AP Photo/Julio Cortez

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 the remainder of the trip.

According to Turner, the biggest maintenance obstacles are keeping the rollers on the belt aligned and making sure it runs smoothly. The rollers are equipped with chips that signal when they are about to fail and need to be replaced. This helps prevent wear and tear and keeps the machine running consistently.

The belt cuts through a large oil patch, where environmentalists have long raised concerns about the industry disturbing local habitats, including those of the sagebrush lizard, which the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed as an endangered species last year.

“In addition to that, we know that the sand will expedite further drilling nearby,” said Luke Metzger, executive director of Environment Texas. “We could see more drilling than we otherwise would, which means more air pollution, more spills than we otherwise would.”

The Dune Express runs for about 12 to 14 hours a day at roughly half capacity, but the company expects it to roll along at all hours later this year.

In New Mexico, Lea County Commissioner Brad Weber said he hopes the belt alleviates traffic on a parallel highway where car crashes are frequent.

“I believe it’s going to make a very positive impact here,” he said.