Kelcy Warren is good at getting a return on his investments.
The billionaire pipeline mogul goes big and moves fast — even if it sometimes looks bad from the outside.
That’s how his company, Energy Transfer, built the Dakota Access oil pipeline in spite of bitter tribal protests. And that’s how the company made $2.4 billion from buying and selling natural gas during the deadly Texas blackouts in 2021.
This year, he’s invested $5 million in the campaign to elect former President Donald Trump to another term in the White House. The potential return on investment is high.
A Department of Energy under a second Trump administration could put Energy Transfer’s natural gas export project in Louisiana back on track. If he retakes power, the former Republican president could end talk of “pausing” federal export permits and dial back President Joe Biden’s heightened scrutiny of the types of mergers and acquisitions Warren uses to expand his company. A second Trump term could also put to rest the continued threats to Dakota Access.
“He is a very wealthy guy, and he owns a critical element of U.S. energy infrastructure,” said Cal Jillson, a professor of political science at Southern Methodist University just outside Dallas. “The way he protects it, from his perspective, is to be more of an old-style Republican economic conservative in which he protects his business from over regulation and taxation by face-to-face opportunities to lobby on behalf of his interests.”
The oil and gas industry has given Trump more money than all but three other industries, according to the campaign finance tracking site OpenSecrets.org. And Warren is a top giver from the industry, tied with Midland oilman Tim Dunn for first place among oil moguls.
The petrodollars oil tycoons are shoveling into Trump’s campaign demonstrate how closely the GOP nominee has aligned himself with an industry respected for its job creation and clout in global energy markets and vilified for its environmental record and its economic power over American consumers.
And the prospect of Vice President Kamala Harris winning the White House is even more frightening to many oil and gas executives than was four more years of Biden. Warren himself has said he’s “scared to death” when politicians talk about banning fracking, which is exactly what Harris did during her short-lived campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. She has since walked that back but hasn’t made clear how she might be different than Biden on energy issues.
“There is a strong sense that Biden, and especially Harris, represent an existential threat to the status quo for the oil and natural gas industry,” said Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University in Houston.
The $5 million Warren sent to Trump ties him with Dunn for seventh place on the list of top Trump donors compiled by OpenSecrets. The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
According to an analysis of contributions done by OpenSecrets for POLITICO’s E&E News, Warren and his wife, Amy, have contributed nearly $28 million to federal candidates and nearly $7 million to Texas candidates since the end of 2010, almost all of it to Republicans.
‘Looks bad from the outside’
Warren, 68, has a square jaw, a well-groomed shock of cottony white hair and an all-American story.
He grew up in the small town of White Oak in East Texas. His father was a field hand for a pipeline company and served on the local school board. Now, Warren owns that pipeline company, along with many others, and serves on the University of Texas Board of Regents.
Warren co-founded Energy Transfer in 1996 with Ray Davis, who is now the majority owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team. He built it up from a 200-mile regional pipeline network in Texas into what is now a sprawling, $54 billion empire with 130,000 miles of pipelines along with terminals and processing plants.
With a fortune of around $6 billion, Forbes ranks Warren the 192nd-wealthiest person in the United States. The publication gives Warren a “self-made score” of 9 out of 10 for rising from a working-class background. He gets philanthropy score of 2 out of 5, indicating he’s given away less than 5 percent of his wealth.
He lives in a 23,000-square-foot home on an eight-acre estate in a tony enclave of Dallas called Preston Hollow. He also has a 3,500-acre ranch in western Colorado, a ranch in Texas where he hosts an annual music festival, an estate in Ireland and an island off the coast of Honduras.
Warren isn’t known to talk much about climate change. Energy Transfer’s public reports tend to point to it as something that politicians and others are concerned about, making it something the company has to deal with. But he’s ardently dismissive of anyone saying that oil and gas could be phased out by an “energy transition.” In 2021 at a Texas energy conference, he noted that oil and gas are used in everything from fertilizer to facial cosmetics, adding, “Can you imagine a world without makeup?”
Requests for comment and an interview with Warren, placed with the Energy Transfer media relations office, went unanswered.
But a lawsuit he filed in 2022 against a Democrat who’d called his $1 million contribution to Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott “corrupt,” offered his view of his involvement in politics.
“Like millions of Americans around the country, Warren exercises his right to make political contributions to the campaigns of candidates whose policies he supports,” his attorneys wrote. Their description also emphasized that Warren is a private citizen and successful self-made businessman who’s never run for public office and doesn’t “maintain a public social media profile or regularly comment publicly on political issues.”
About 4.5 million people gave $200 or more to federal candidates in 2020, the last presidential election year, according to OpenSecrets. About 5,300 gave $100,000 or more, about two-tenths of a thousandth (0.00002) of a percent of the U.S. voting age population.
Some of Warren’s biggest gifts to politicians occurred at times of political peril and financial profit. Warren has regularly given large amounts of money to Abbott. But before 2021, he’d never given more than $250,000 in one shot. In June 2021, he sent Abbott $1 million.
Warren’s money arrived as outrage grew about how state officials responded to blackouts across Texas during Winter Storm Uri four months earlier. It left more than 240 dead in Texas and the gas industry $11 billion richer.
Prices had soared a hundredfold or more in February as freezing temperatures caused a cascade of failures in the gas system, leading to scarcity but also profits for pipeline companies and gas marketers. Energy Transfer, a major gas marketer in Texas, was among the biggest winners, reeling in $2.4 billion.
That led to calls for a crackdown on gas suppliers, which didn’t occur. Instead, Texans will subsidize new gas-fired power plants with low-interest loans. And the fuel and power costs racked up during the crisis will be paid by Texans over years with a surcharge on their power bills.
“There has been some outrage, but not policy changes, not penalties,” said Alison Silverstein, a Texas-based energy consultant who authored a report on the blackouts. “Well, there have been a lot of policy changes, but many of those policy changes are trying to solve the wrong problem.”
Two weeks after Abbott declared “everything that needed to be done was done” to fix the power grid in Texas without any major overhaul of their businesses, Warren cut the $1 million check.
To SMU’s Jillson, it was one of those moves that looks bad from the outside. The timing of the uncharacteristically large contribution, he said, following so closely on the heels of the disaster and legislative response, created the appearance of impropriety.
“I have thought of him as willing to draw adverse attention on behalf of his business,” Jillson said. “But these sort of unforced errors, I think, are not common with him, and the timing here does constitute an unforced error.”
Abbott’s Democratic opponent, former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, said it wasn’t just a mistake but openly corrupt. O’Rourke launched his campaign alleging gas companies, especially Warren’s company, “bought off” the governor, and said during one campaign stop that the contribution “looks like a bribe to me.”
After Energy Transfer threatened to cut off delivery of natural gas to power plants in a payment dispute, O’Rourke accused Warren’s company of “extortion.” Warren sued O’Rourke for defamation in 2022.
A state appeals court dismissed the case, saying it was “protected speech” under the First Amendment of the Constitution. In December 2023, the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court refused to hear Warren’s appeal of its dismissal. Through a representative, O’Rourke declined to comment.
History with Trump
Warren has given millions more to Trump than to Abbott. But his bet on the real estate magnate and reality TV star actually started small — at least, for a billionaire.
In 2016, Warren and his wife Amy gave $3,000 to Trump and $100,000 to Trump’s joint fundraising operation, Trump Victory.
That was more than many of his fellow oil moguls. The oil and gas industry all but sat out the presidential race that year. Hillary Clinton seemed hostile to their interests. And though Trump offered kind words, the industry’s politically active members figured he couldn’t win.
Warren had first put his money on Rick Perry, the former Texas governor who served on Energy Transfer’s board before during and after his brief campaign. Perry sent back $4.5 million of the $6 million Warren had put in. The Warrens gave $1.5 million to Republican congressional campaign efforts.
After Trump won, Warren quickly showed enthusiasm, telling analysts, “My God, this is going to be refreshing.”
But about a month after that, the Obama administration sent the Dakota Access pipeline project into bureaucratic limbo, withholding an easement needed to cross under a federal lake. Construction of the 1,172-mile oil pipeline from North Dakota to a pipeline connection in Illinois had inspired intense protests by thousands of people massed along the path of the line in 2016 and 2017. The bitter fight spurred a debate about tribal treaty rights and the costs of the United States’ newfound abundance of oil.
Warren has said he’s so proud of Dakota Access, it’s “like talking about my son.” And now, it faced an existential threat.
Warren upped the ante with $250,000 for Trump’s inauguration.
Four days after the event, Trump signed an executive memorandum rescuing Dakota Access. Less than five months later, it was pumping oil southward from the prolific Bakken oil field in North Dakota.
The oil and gas industry found itself back in favor during the Trump administration. Trump picked then-ExxonMobil Chief Executive Rex Tillerson to be secretary of State, pulled the United States out of the Paris climate agreement and placed Scott Pruitt, an oil state attorney general, atop EPA. Pruitt dialed back federal enforcement cases opposed by state regulators.
But the industry was hurting in 2020 when Warren hosted Trump’s first fundraiser since the pandemic. Months before, as lockdowns swept the country, demand had fallen so hard and so fast that the oil price briefly dipped below zero.
Warren’s Dakota Access pipeline was pumping oil, but still in legal jeopardy. A month after the fundraiser, a federal judge ordered it closed and “drained of oil” because the environmental review for the permit to cross under a federally-owned lake was insufficient.
The Trump event at Warren’s Dallas estate raised $10 million. On top of that, Warren added $10 million of his own money.
Pipeline politics
Energy Transfer had another problem that was less well-known. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission had launched two “nonpublic” investigations into possible violations during construction of the Rover gas pipeline in Ohio. Rover crews had spilled 2 million gallons of drilling fluid laced with toxic diesel fuel, and company officials had demolished a historic home near the pipeline’s path after telling FERC they wouldn’t.
The agency would eventually seek $60 million in fines. But the cases were dormant until Trump left office, Biden appointed a new FERC chair, and the commission authorized enforcement proceedings.
It’s possible that the cases might never have seen the light of day if Trump had won in 2020, said Tyson Slocum, director of the energy program at consumer protection group Public Citizen and an expert in FERC procedure.
“It’s not inconceivable,” Slocum said. “There’s a good chance it would go away.”
This year, with the election approaching, Dakota Access is still subject to being shut down at the discretion of whoever is in the White House, because it still lacks an easement to cross under the federal lake in North Dakota. The Army Corps of Engineers, which owns the lake, is expected to issue a new environmental report on Dakota Access after the election.
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has led the fight to shut down the pipeline, fearful it could contaminate that lake, which supplies water to the tribe. Doug Crow Ghost, the tribe’s water resources director, said of Warren’s contributions to Trump, “We have bad billionaire players that are only funding other billionaires … to allow the destruction of Mother Earth.”
During his three and a half years in office, Biden has green-lighted the controversial Willow oil project in Alaska and approved a deal to assure the Mountain Valley pipeline through Virginia would be completed. And he’s made no move to shut down Dakota Access.
But Biden angered the industry on many fronts as he pushed to reduce the effects of climate change. He has approved new rules for methane, rejoined the Paris Agreement and imposed new regulations on thousands of miles of pipelines. The industry was particularly stirred to anger by his decision to pause the permitting process for liquefied natural gas export terminals.
Though Harris backed off of the idea of “banning fracking,” she has retained the support of environmentalists. She’s also retained the skepticism, if not outright hostility, of oil and gas executives. They still regard her, warily, as a California official who prosecuted oil companies for spills and supported a “Green New Deal.”
“In Warren’s ideal world, United States is like Texas,” said Rice University’s Jones. “In his nightmare world, it’s like California.”
Energy Transfer executives in particular have been outraged that the Department of Energy refused to extend the company’s permit for its liquefied natural gas export terminal near Lake Charles, Louisiana.
And EPA is currently considering “debarring” Energy Transfer because of its no contest plea in a Pennsylvania pollution case. That would prevent it from receiving federal contracts.
Warren also has a big personal stake in federal tax policy. According to an investigation by the news outlet ProPublica, based on leaked IRS tax returns, he paid nothing in taxes to the federal government four of the nine years between 2010 and 2018.
Warren is suing the federal contractor whose employee reportedly leaked Warren’s tax returns. The employee is serving a five-year prison sentence.
So, if there’s little mystery about why Warren would want to see Trump back in power, it remains unclear why he’s sent Trump only half as much money as he did in 2020. Warren isn’t offering explanations.
“Well,” said Jones, “I mean, there’s still time to give.”
