May 25, 2025 • 45 mins
On this week’s episode of The Energy Mixx radio show, Mike Howard of Howard Energy Partners sits down with Pierce Norton, President and CEO of ONEOK, to discuss the ever-changing energy landscape.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to the nationally syndicated Energy Mix Radio Show, produced
by the Energy Network Media Group. The Energy Mix Radio
Show will give you an inside look at the energy
industry and how it affects you by talking with industry leaders, experts,
and government officials on the Energy Mix Radio Show.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Welcome to the Energy Mix Radio Show. I'm your guest
host today Mike Howard, and I have the distinct pleasure
of getting to interview Pierce Norton, the president and CEO
of One Oak. Pierce, how you doing today? Now?
Speaker 3 (00:30):
I'm doing great, Mike, and I really do appreciate you
having me on the show today. I'm looking forward to
our conversation. Well great, Well, the way I like to start.
My team is going to be watching this eventually, they
are going to laugh. Because the way I start most
of these conversations get to know somebody is where are
you from? And what's your birth order? My birth order
(00:54):
is one and one. I'm an only child from a
little place called heflin Alabama. I like to say it's
a two red light town. And I'm very very fortunate
to be where I am today. But what school at
University Alabama? Mechanical engineering degree and really got the good
(01:16):
fortune of starting out my career in the field. So
I worked in operations, construction, and engineering for basically thirteen years.
So I'd like to say that kind of shaped who
I am and who I got to work with and
my mentors.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
What area of Dell High did you work?
Speaker 3 (01:35):
I worked actually in East Texas for about three years.
I got transferred to the corporate office in Dallas, and
then I'd like to say that my boss was an
Aggie in Alabama. Played the Aggies on September fourteenth of
nineteen eighty five. We beat them, and then Monday morning
got transferred to.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Pacas, Texas. Gosh, Pacas is pretty pop for today, but
back then Pecas was not. It was pretty far out
of West Texas.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
Yeah, I think one thing distinguishes that, Mike, and it's
ten dollars crude while I was out there, So let's
just say it won the most booming place in the world.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
No, you know, I'm always curious. I come from a
very small town as well in South Texas. You know,
why did you choose mechanical engineering?
Speaker 3 (02:24):
You know, I think it is the most diverse engineering
curriculum and it allows you to you could go and
work in the space industry. You could work for free
do lay, you could work for a you know, a
paper mill, you could work in the oil and gas industry.
You can do just about anything. I call it the
Swiss Army Knife of engineering. And that's the reason I
(02:47):
chose that. These days, it seems to be harder and
harder to attract people in our industry, and we're always
looking for ways to attract people from small towns that
are looking for a great career. Are y'all doing anything
like that right now? We do. You know, we we
have a lot of programs around our organization where we
(03:08):
actually go into high schools.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
We put a lot of money even into some tech schools. Uh.
There's one up in Watford City, North Dakota that we
actually went in with the with the state and other
industry leaders and built a tech facility right beside the
Watfort City High School so people can see the transition.
You know, people usually gravitate to what they can see,
(03:33):
beautiful facility up there, great great curriculum.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
And so yeah, we do that, and I think it's
but the biggest thing is I think is telling people
and the young people, you know, what a purposeful or
uh industry this is and how important it is to
the country and our national security and our economic viability.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
I love that you mentioned your organization, you know, One Oak.
I've admired One O for a law long time, followed
you for a long time, mostly post COVID, just because
all of us in the energy business got you know,
hit pretty hard during COVID and post COVID. But if
I was meeting you, a lot of our listeners on
this radio show may not be in the energy business,
(04:16):
or they're at a different segment of the energy business.
Who is One Oak? What do you do? What are
your business lines?
Speaker 3 (04:22):
The simplest way I can explain this, Mike, is that
we touch a lot of molecules. And what I mean
by that is natural gas, ethane, propane isobutane, normal bututane, gasoline.
And now we're in the refined products business, which is
the motor gasolines, the jet fuels, the diesel, and the
(04:44):
crudal And so in its simplest form, what we do
is we want to touch as many molecules as we can,
as many times as we can, for as long as
we can, and we're moving these molecules to the point
where they're not as valuable to a point where they
are as valuable are more valuable. So that's that's in
(05:06):
a nutshell what it is we do. But we're in
the gathering, processing business, treating business. We're in the natural
gas intrast state interstate business. We're also in the natural
gas liquids business, fractionation business, refined products storage, and the
intercrude all gathering and transmission. So we touch about every
(05:27):
facet of the midstrame that you can touch.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
You know you started your career. I'm going to say that,
you know del High, I've met so many ex del
High employees that I know we in our past. I'm
sure we share a bunch of them. I would consider
that an unregulated business where it's kind of gathering and
processing of molecules out we're saying some of the businesses
you just mentioned are definitely more on the transmission regulated,
(05:55):
completely different looking business. Is that right?
Speaker 3 (05:59):
It is right, Mike. But those those molecules, you know,
they go through and touch all of those business segments
that each business segment has its has a little bit
of a unique business model. But then it's you know,
rarest form. We are a volume time for right company.
And then you've got certain regulations that you have on
(06:21):
others that you don't in other forms of our business.
But you know, we we navigate those the way we
do any any other thing. So it's all about the customers.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
Since two thousand and twenty one, you all have been
on a tremendous growth effort. It seemed like following you guys,
what was kind of the genesis of that or what
you know, if I think about your company, maybe talk
about the size that you were maybe around twenty twenty
and the size that you are today.
Speaker 3 (06:54):
Well, I'll even go back to when when we spun
out the utility out of one O Kayaks went with
that particular company, stayed with them for seven and a
half years. But just to give you some perspective, Mike,
when I left the company, our earnings are Evada was
about one point five billion dollars a year and today,
(07:16):
you know, our guidance for this year is around eight
point two two five billion, so tremendous amount of growth,
you know, just in the last fifteen years.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Uh. The way that all.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
Came about was, you know, we came Uh. One of
k has always been in a kind of a transformational
phase starting in the year two thousand when they started
turning more pivoting more away from the utility business and
more on the midstream side of the business. So they
did quite a few acquisitions, you know, in the early years.
(07:47):
And then we went through a period where because we
had all these these different assets in different areas, they
needed to be connected. And so we went through this
very large organic growth face.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (07:59):
And then when I came back from the utility in
twenty twenty one, it was time to really step back
a minute and assess where's this company going to go
for sustainability for the next decade. And so we sat
down as a management team. This was not you know,
just me, it was it was a collective group of
(08:20):
the people that led this company, and we sat down
and sided, you know, what are the key factors that
we need to address in order to get us to
where we need to be. We did that, we socialized
that with the board, and then we went to work.
You know, we kind of call it our our acquisition funnel.
We went then to work looking at what it is,
what companies might fit what we're looking for. And I'll
(08:42):
give you one great example in twenty twenty one, we
were pretty heavily tied to the baking area up in
North Dakota. Uh So, you know, you could see every
time crude old price went up or down, you know,
our stock price went up or down. So one of
the things that we wanted to do was diverse if
I diverse I into some different businesses and also diversify
(09:04):
into different geographical areas. And as we started looking at companies,
Magellan is the one that came to the forefront because
they had one point five billion in earnings and they
were spending less than one hundred million dollars a year
to do that. And you know, in the gathering and
processing business it's a continual reinvestment because of the decline
(09:25):
of the wells. So having a business with a lot
of cash flow would really set us up to even
do better on the gathering and the processing side. So
that's the one that we did first, and then we
went morphed into doing some of these other g and
p opportunities.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
Later.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
I would say that we wouldn't be in the gathering
business of crude had we not had done Magellan, because
we wouldn't have had the long haul pipes for that
and Our whole model is about connectivity and the interconnection
between our businesses.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
And Pierce, give me a sense of size of when
you say Magell and Magellan was a company doing very
well on its own and just so happy you're both
I think Tulsa based companies. You know, But what what
was the size of what o versus the size Magell
and what was the size of that that acquisition.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
Well, the size of of one. It was larger than Magellan,
but not materially. I mean, it was a very large
acquisition force, you know, and you know that's uh. What
made it a little bit easier and and tough was
the fact that our corporate offices were both in the
(10:37):
city of Tulsa. A lot of times, if you're looking
to consolidate things into a corporate office and you buy
something that's that's in another it has another corporate office
in another city, then you lose a lot of people
because because you don't you know, when you when you
tip transfer people, then they don't want to move. This
(10:57):
one was kind of right the opposite of that. Everybody,
and we were very fortunate that we didn't have to
actually at trip many people in putting them together. It
was the things that you would normally see is you
don't need two C suites. We have some overlap, you
know in ir you have some overlap in accounting those
kind of things. But it was basically untouched in the field.
(11:19):
But one OK was larger than Magellan, But Magellan was
very critical as to d One of the things I
would say is that scale Magellan was big enough to
make an impact, and that was one of the things
we were looking for. We didn't want to just do
something small. We wanted to do something that was meaningful
for our shareholders.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
We're going to take a break here real quick, and
I want to come back and I want to hit
you up on talking about doing some sort of It's
almost like a merger of equals there whenever you think
about that size of acquisition and talk through that a
little bit. But right now you're listening to the Energy
Mix radio show with your guest host Mike Howard.
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Speaker 2 (13:02):
All right, welcome back. You're listening to the Energy Mix,
the radio show with your guest host Mike Howard, and
I have the pleasure of visiting with Pierce Norton, the
CEO of One Oak. Pierce, we just talked through a
major acquisition that your company did in the last few years.
Tell me some more of the other acquisition you had
(13:23):
that was Magellan and One Oat combined to almost double
size your company. It's sounded like, what else have you
done since twenty twenty one?
Speaker 3 (13:30):
So we also did something called the Eastern Assets. That
was something that we'd actually been looking at even prior
to prior to doing Magellan, but it was just a
must to have once we did Magellan. Because we did
the Eastern Assets actually connects the two together. It connects
(13:54):
our mind Bellevue facilities, which is all of our storage
of all of our liquid you know, utane's gasolines UH
and then being able to connect those over to basically
East Houston to the Galena Park UH into UH what
we call MVP, which is the Pasadena facility. Then we
(14:15):
can now connect those and use those for some blending
opportunities that we didn't have before. One thing I would
tell you that we we learned through the Magellan acquisition.
We had a pretty good handle on the well head
to the downstream, you know, to the end of the frack,
but we really didn't understand how much value there was
(14:38):
past the fractionation facility. And that's what we've learned UH
with UH with Magellan. Easton was one. Then we went
on and moved into in Link, which was a gathering
of processing business. The way I like to describe this
is we actually had a considerable amount of liquids coming
from those processing plants into our NGO business.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (14:59):
But what in link act is the capability to compete
on a full value strength. So they have the gathering
and the processing, but they didn't have the NGLs to
take away and the fractionation, so they were using us
for some of that stuff. But to be able to
take all the areas, which was basically mid con North Texas,
(15:21):
Permian and then over into Louisiana, be able to connect
all of those Now we had bridges between all those
islands and it's really working out well for UCE.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
Yeah, amazing. You have said something that piqued my interest.
Downstream of fractionation. What is downstream of fractionation.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
Downstream of fractionation is what else you can do to
combine those products with the refined products. Refined products primarily
come off of the you know, off of the refineries,
but there's things that you can do to enhance those
products with the products that you get from the NGL business.
(16:05):
And so we weren't able to take advantage of those
kind of things in the past. Until we put these
two companies together.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
Yeah, one of the things that we've experienced, just to
give the listeners a sense of kind of what we're
talking about. If you go back to say two thousand
and five, and the US was using let's say around
eighteen TCF of natural gas today to today the US
(16:36):
is using closer to forty forty one tcf. In that growth,
there's a lot of these natural gas liquids that come
out of the gas. Has other businesses grown to absorb that.
We know where the natural gas is going. It's going
to power plants and also to LNG exports. Where are
(16:56):
these natural gas liquids going.
Speaker 3 (16:58):
Well, first of all, you're heading on the topic that
I really like to talk about. These NGL liquids are
going primarily to the petrochemical industries. Okay, well, but not
that's There's been a tremendous amount of owned shoring coming
from petricams building those facilities in the Gulf coast over
the last fifteen years. So a lot of those liquids
(17:20):
are absorbed there, but you have to go down each
one of them. That's primarily the ethnane. The propane is
pretty much at a in a domestic sense at equilibrium,
So to the extent that you have more propane than
you can consume domestically, that's got to go over the water.
But ASIA is going to drive a lot of that
(17:42):
in the future. They're going to basically Asia is going
to drive the crudal increases that we have in this country.
They're going to also take the LPGs and the legies
all of us. So Asia is going to be very
important to the success of this industry. But you know,
you just mentioned the the eighteen TCF and the forty
(18:04):
one t c F. You know, it's it's going to
really increase. And I'll go to BCF numbers now, but
you're looking at you're taking talking about ten BCF of
additional law LNG capacity, you know, localfied natural gas export
capacity in the United States just over the next five years.
(18:25):
And then you've got artificial intelligence. Well we haven't even
touched on that yet. Uh, that could probably be going
to get there, trust me, three to eight you know
bcf a day. So those numbers are going to really
drive up the number of tcfs that are being used,
are consumed here, are you know, produced here in the
(18:46):
United States.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
So it's a.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
It's an exciting time, but I also it's kind of
a quiet period. You know, between two thousand and seven
and ten, you still only got up to about twenty TCFU,
But then all of a sudden, you've started taking over
and in like a period of twenty ten to twenty
twenty two twenty twenty four, we actually increased to about
(19:10):
seventeen bcf a day just on coal plant conversions with
natural gas to taken over the coals up. So natural
gas is playing a major major role here in the
United States.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
Probably starting nerding out. I'm a chemical engineer by trade,
and so I just love the numbers side of the business.
And what I've learned is where I'm trying to advocate
for our industry, people get lost in some of these numbers.
But it's just shocking the growth that our industry has
experienced really in the last ten years. And really the
(19:46):
demand for our products was relatively flat for quite a
few years. Yes, there was coal switching going on, but
now we're seeing a resurgence of demand that's kind of
unprecedented in the velocity that we're seeing as a demand
for our industry. So when we come back here after
(20:08):
a commercial break, we're going to talk about what is
driving that demand increase. That's kind of I believe at
unprecedented levels. So with that, you're listening to the Energy
Mix radio show.
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Speaker 2 (21:22):
All right, welcome back to the Energy Mix radio show
with your guest host Mike Howard, and have the pleasure
of speaking to Pierce Thornton, the CEO of One Oak. So, Pierce,
we just talked about where the natural gas business and
a lot of liquids business in our industry has grown
over last ten to twenty years. What's driving that growth today?
Speaker 3 (21:44):
That the growth today, Mike, is being driven primarily by
liquefied natural gas facilities. Right now, there's five facilities that
are currently being built. So there's about fourteen bcf day
of lngxport facility here in the United States. That's going
to grow by about another ten bcf a day. Uh
(22:06):
and it's mainly on the Gulf Coast. So of the
five facilities that are being built right now, four of
them are in Texas. But then there's another seven or
so that are on the board that are potentially going
to be f i D you know, in the next
five years for the next wave, and most of those
are going to be in the Louisiana area. And what
(22:26):
we're excited about is through our inn Link acquisition, we
picked up a lot of assets in Louisiana and we're
actually expanding our storage feels down there. We're really excited
about that because if you look at the expansion of
the amount of natural gas that's going in that's being
produced in the United States, storage really hasn't grown that much.
(22:47):
You know, it's it was around four point four tcf,
it's now around four point eight. But I believe we're
going to need a lot more because we're going to
have so much more gas. And storage is what balance
is everything out when things don't work exactly the way
you want them to, you know, as far as an
LNG plant going down or whatever. The other thing that's
(23:08):
driving it is the is the uh is AI data centers.
We went for almost twenty years MIKE without any increase
in the in the consumption. I call them quads of
energy UH for for electric generation, and it was is
held pretty flat. We're now starting to see growth in
(23:28):
that area and it's driven by the by the AI
Data centers. And then you're going to continue to probably
have some level of gas you know, coal to gas
switching UH but it's probably going to be minimized because
there may be such an insatiable appetite for electricity that
many of these coal plants that they may have decided
(23:49):
to shut down, they may not shut down now first
quite some time because of that energy demand.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
One of the sayings that we like to say around
here is that you know, energy is thermodynamically linked to GDP,
meaning that in developing economies especially, but once the economy
becomes developed like the US, it's it's pretty flat, like
you're mentioning for the last twenty years, you kind of
get an equilibrium where you can still grow GDP but
(24:16):
not necessarily have to use more energy. And what you're
describing with with l G export and with AI, that is,
if I did my math right here, that is an
additional twenty four BCF. And if you're producing I think
you said something about one hundred BCF right now. Basically
(24:37):
in the US twenty forty one TCF is around one
hundred bcf masa menos, So a twenty four percent increase
And what timeframe is that.
Speaker 3 (24:46):
It's probably going to be between now and say twenty
thirty twenty thirty five.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
Wow, that is in America's history that quite possibly we're
talking about post World War two time velocities here. It
feels like it does.
Speaker 3 (25:02):
It does, But I tell you the natural gas. But
to put it in perspective, in twenty and sixteen, we
were actually looking at importing energy into this country, and
then by twenty sixteen we started export. So we've actually
only been exporting natural gas out of this country in
(25:23):
a meaningful way since twenty and sixteen. That's phenomenal growth.
You know, just just to get to fourteen billion qb
feet a day is a standing because, like you said, Mike,
you kind of get to equilibrium, you know when you
look at because natural gas is used for electricity generation issues,
for residential areas, commercial industrial loads, and then a little
(25:48):
bit into transportation. But it is you know, we use
the term Swiss army knife. It is the Swiss Army
knife of energy.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
Natural gas is well great when we come We're going
to continue the conversation with Pier Snort and the CEO
of One Oak. You listen to the Energy Mix radio show.
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Speaker 2 (27:22):
All right, Welcome back. This is the Energy Mixed Radio
Show with your guest host Mike Howard, and today we're
speaking to Pierce Norton, the CEO of One Oak. Pierce.
One of the things that we share in common is
we've you currently working with in Link employees and I
at one time worked at a predecessor in Link Cross
(27:42):
tex Energy, cross Tech Energy. It is such a great
time working there that they actually helped start up Howard
Energy Partners. They're one of my original equity investors, which
is kind of an odd way to start a company
that actually helped a competitor get started. But you know,
we were we were in South Texas and they didn't
(28:03):
have a South Texas presence and that's why they did it.
But I have some fond memories of your employees in
Louisiana and hopefully some of them are listening to this
radio show right now, and mostly because of the culture.
And as I can imagine, you've had One Oak, which
is a how old is one Oak?
Speaker 3 (28:20):
Remind me it is around one hundred and twenty years old.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
You have a one hundred and twenty year energy company
in one Oak. Combined with Magellan, then you take in Link.
That feels like a lot of cultures coming together. And
as we talk about attracting and retaining talent in our industry,
you know, how do you integrate that culture whenever you're
(28:47):
changing so much and so fast? Because Obviously, if you
have one hundred and twenty year old culture, it's got
to be good or else you it would have gone
away a long time ago. So how's that integration in
your mind? How do you think it?
Speaker 3 (29:01):
So, the biggest challenge that we have when it comes
to integration is what I would call prioritization, because everybody's
excited about two companies coming together. You wouldn't have put
these companies together had they not have been greater together
than either one of them were a part. Aaron Milfern
and I used to talk about that a lot with
(29:22):
the employees when we were going through the you know,
the acquisition of Magellan, and we truly truly believe that.
But what the way you process that is you have
to break it down into three areas. The first one
is you've got to stabilize the organization.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
Uh. What I mean by that is.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
You you've got to send a clear message that you've
got to maintain safe and reliable day to day operations.
You got to over communicate, you know, gotta you got
to tell them what you know and what you don't know, uh,
and do it a lot.
Speaker 2 (29:57):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
And then you've got to be visible uh And that's
the whole goal there is to build trust. And then
the third piece or the second piece of this is
to integrate. So you got to set your org structure up.
You got to facilitate people getting together because that's the
way the ideas are born. And then you got to
have decisions on your systems. We all have a bunch
of systems that run these different companies, and many times
(30:20):
when you put two together, they may not be the same.
So you've got to make decisions are we going to
go with one or the other? And then the last
of them is to transform the organization because you want
to take advantage of the successes in both cultures or
whatever culture you're adding to it, and not be so
stuck in your ways that you say, well, our way
(30:41):
is the only way. So it's all about innovation. It's
about the employees coming together and finding a better way
to do it than maybe we've done it in the past.
But that's kind of on the tail end. If you
don't stabilize and integrate first, you don't ever get to
the transformation phase.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
You started in the field like I did. I worked
in the field for ten years and I see as
I follow one oak and see some of your messaging.
You go to the field quite a bit. What's that
feel like? Because you know, whatever I was in the field,
I would look at these executives come out of their
ivory tower and really question their authenticity and stuff. How
(31:19):
do you feel like going in the field these days
and how are you connecting with people?
Speaker 3 (31:24):
Well, what's unique about my story is I work for
eight different companies and all eight of those companies actually
have they own either one ok oonnes either the entire corporation,
or they own the majority of the assets. So when
I go to the field, I'm going home A lot
(31:44):
of times, I'm going back to see people that if
I'm lucky enough, there's people that are still there that
I work with forty two years ago. And that's a
special time for me because I always have a real
special I like to people ask me, well, how's the
weather today? And I say, well, where I was, it
was seventy degrees. But I can guarantee our feeld people
(32:07):
they don't work in seventy degree weather every day. They
work maybe up in North Dakota minus sixty and maybe
one hundred and ten to one hundred and fifteen, you know,
down to summer West Texas areas. So I just have
a deep appreciation for what they do. If you've done
that work before, you know it. It doesn't always go
the way that you think it's going to go, and
(32:28):
it never ends. We move these products twenty four hours
a day and it's the feel people that make that happen.
Anytime I get a chance to go out and thank
our field people for what they do, it's the reason
I have a job. And if they didn't do what
they do, none of us would be here. And we
also had to build on the backs of those that
(32:49):
came before us, and it's our responsibility to make sure
that we make decisions that the next generation has the
same opportunity that we do. I just have a real
passion for what it is that our people in the
field do. They are the core, the foundation.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
Of the company. I couldn't agree more. We had our
town hall yesterday. I try to model our company after
great companies like y'all and trying to connect to where
the real war. I always say, where the real work
happens clicking on a keyboard. Sometimes this doesn't give the
same satisfaction as getting to hear a compressor startup, or
pumps run, or gas flowing through pipes. They just it
(33:31):
gives you a better sense that we're actually doing real
work out here. You know, Well, if you've ever.
Speaker 3 (33:36):
Gone out in the middle of the field, Mike, and
you know you've done this before, and it's nothing but
maybe a corn field, and when you leave, you know
there's this giant processing facility, compression facilities, and all the
pieces and parts that make that work, and the people
that put the effort into making a it's just an
incredible I wish most Americans could see what it is
(33:58):
that our field people do. I think they would appreciate
the energy when they turned their lights on a whole
lot more. You mentioned town hall. We just did our
town hall actually from Lafayette, Louisiana, so I got to
experience the culture down there firsthand, and you're right there,
second to none.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
That was that was my area when I worked at
cross Tex which is in Link which you acquired. So
that Flacaman's planned there in Baton Rouge and down in
Homa and in Lafayette. We you know, I've been in
those areas and I know some of those guys that
that is a that and that just storage facility that
you have now natural gas storage as Probably my favorite
(34:36):
parts of my career is getting to work in South
Louisiana and getting to enjoy their food and culture in
that area.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
But most people don't know that just is in the
middle of the lake. So went down there. They actually
took me out on a boat, you know, to see
the well heads out there. It's it's incredible.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
Well, we're going to take a break and when we
come back, we're going to talk about energy advocacy. You're
listening to the Energy Mix radio show.
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Speaker 2 (36:12):
All right, welcome back. You're listening to the Energy Mix
radio show with your guest host Mike Howard, and today
we're visiting with Pierce Norton, the CEO of One Oak. Pierce.
One of the things we talked about earlier was AI Uh.
That's an easy thing to say, but you can't have
a conversation in our industry without hearing about the demand
(36:32):
for energy. You can't read a new segment without hearing
about chat GPT and how it's transforming so many other industries.
We understand it from an energy standpoint, we're also using
it inside of our companies, and so I want to
talk a little bit about just AI inside of one
oak and what you're doing operationally with it, but then
(36:53):
also from the energy usage standpoint, and you've already mentioned
some of the demand coming with AI, but talk about
what is real and what is it real? So let's
just start with the operations of what oak. What do
y'all use an AI for in your business?
Speaker 3 (37:09):
Well, there's two main areas right now, Mike, that we're
using it in. One is in our refined products business,
but we're using AI to basically monitor electrical loads across
the country and we can actually predict when spikes and
energy prices are going to happen. And that is a
particular business because we have tankage on both ends of
(37:33):
the of the pipes we can actually store and it
allows us to stop the pumps, which means that we
aren't using electricity. So when we see these energy spikes
coming through this AI data analysis, we can literally shut
down pumps in our system and avoid those extra cost
which really just go right to the bottom line into
(37:54):
our shareholders. So that's one way that we're using it.
The other way, i'd like to explain this and you
know this because you've been in the business, but we
just have millions and millions of data points coming in
through scat of systems every day, so we're literally drowning
in data. But what we thirst for is the intelligence
(38:15):
and the knowledge that comes from that data, and AI
is the super computing is going to give us the
capability to literally assess that information that normal humans just
could not get through in the past.
Speaker 2 (38:30):
So I'm really.
Speaker 3 (38:32):
Excited about that. You can use it, you know, in
your fractionation facilities, these distillation towers because you've got pressures
and temperatures there. You mentioned there's a chemical engineer, so
I'm probably really talking your language here, but you know,
being able to squeeze out just another five or ten
percent efficiency can be very meaningful to our industry.
Speaker 2 (38:53):
Well that that's exactly why we have so much data
coming in, and how to organize that data into some
sort of key performance indicator that you can actually run
a business on, you know, like that's kind of the
holy grail. It feels like if you can get all
this real time data because we're twenty four to seven
in this industry, and so for how is that you know,
(39:13):
we always our business has been viewed in the past
potentially as a business that's going away that it's maybe
even a dirty business, that it's it's not particularly innovative.
How are you attracting employees when you're talking to college
students and I know you do a lot of work
in that sort of way of attracting people and you're
(39:35):
into the industry is exciting for them? Is that one
of the tools you're using to bring people in to
show like how innovative our industry is.
Speaker 3 (39:44):
That's one might be in you know, you mentioned innovation.
That's actually one of our core values. So the you know,
we have six core values. We have you know, safety
and the environmental ethics, we have inclusion and diversity, we
have innovation and uh and service is one of our pages.
(40:06):
But what we found out is that the younger generation
really gleans onto innovation and they glean onto service. They're
very willing to give back to the communities and that's
something that's very very important to us here at one Oak.
The biggest thing we can do is focus on the
employees that we have because they are ambassadors. They're the
(40:27):
ones that go back home, they're the ones that talk
to their families, they're the ones that talk that are
friends and churches in baseball and and you know, different
different sports leagues that they're in for the kids. And
so I always tell everybody that we want you to
truly feel like this is a place that you just
can't can't do without. We spend more time here than
(40:50):
we do with our own families, and so we want
it to be where the rest of the world may
not know exactly what we're doing here at One Oak,
but I like to say that people say, I want
some of that, and so that's the that's the culture
and the attitude that we're trying to achieve here at
one OH.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
I love that it feels like a higher purpose. It
feels like, you know the way you describe it, that
your employees know that they are work for a higher purpose.
That gets into energy advocacy. And we only have probably
about three minutes left, but like I noticed a lot
of your vocabulary, it really transcends politics and that sort
(41:29):
of thing. It really gets into the issue of of
of getting more energy to more people. How do how
do you talk about that to groups that don't have
a perception of our industry? But how do you promote
our industry from that? From that way?
Speaker 3 (41:43):
Well, I promote it and really. You mentioned the word purpose, Mike,
I think that's that's a that's a very powerful word
in our industry because what we do, uh, it drives
the way we move as a society. It drives the
way we live as a society. It drives the way
that we communicate, and now with AI, it's driving the
(42:03):
way that we learn.
Speaker 2 (42:05):
All of that.
Speaker 3 (42:06):
Takes an enormous amount of energy. But the way that
I like to talk about it is to use examples.
So if I'm talking to an employee that's working in
the gathering business for a crude in the permium basin,
I can literally tell them that you actually have been
able to enable somebody from Denver, Colorado to go to Munich,
(42:29):
Germany on an Airbus three eighty. And the reason I
say that is you can trace that molecule all the
way from the permium basin, all the way through our system,
all the way up to Denver, Colorado, because we have
ninety five percent of the jet fuel in the Dia
Airport comes from US Luftanza. They actually just announced the
flight from Denver to Munich. The thing holds five hundred
(42:52):
and eight people. But what people don't know is it
holds eighty four thousand gallons of jet fuel. You can
fill up five thousand normal cars with what one jet
consumes in jet fuel just going from Denver to Munich.
So you know the purpose. It really energy bridges innovation
(43:13):
with accessibility at scale, and accessibility at scale generates opportunity.
And that's what's so exciting to me about our industry,
and I think that's what excites our young people and
all of our employees.
Speaker 2 (43:26):
I love that, Pierce, you are an inspiration to a
lot of us in the business and everything that you've done.
We've got about forty seconds left. Give us something inspirational
here to send this out of working in this business.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
Well, I would say this is not necessarily coming from me.
I've been very fortunate to have great mentors, great leaders
that push me to challenge me. And the best way
I can probably explain this is just to give you
a little bit of it. Advice of what they gave me.
The first one is have fun. The second one is bluemore.
(44:07):
You're planted a lot of times. This business will take
you to some various places in the world, and you just.
Speaker 2 (44:13):
You enjoy it when you're there.
Speaker 3 (44:15):
Another advice I got was it's a pretty fat, pretty
flat pancake that doesn't have two sites. That just tells
you that, you know, there's always another side to the story.
When you hear somebody coming at you or whatever, try
to understand their point of view. And then the last
two I'd give you as many lessons learned will have
to be relearned without open communication and knowledge sharing. I
(44:39):
think that's very important in our industry. And the last
one is as a leader, give clear direction and then
trust your people to do their job.
Speaker 2 (44:46):
Piers, thank you for being with us today. You've been
very gracious with your time. I'm your host, Mike Howard.
This is the Energy Mix Radio Show.
Speaker 1 (44:54):
The Energy Mix Radio Show is where we explore topics
that affect us all in the oil and gas industry.
Every week week, our host will interview the movers and
shakers in this fast paced industry. You'll hear from industry experts,
elected officials, and many more on the Energy Mixed Radio Show.
Welcome to the nationally syndicated Energy Mix Radio Show, produced
by the Energy Network Media Group. The Energy Mix Radio
Show will give you an inside look at the energy
industry and how it affects you by talking with industry leaders, experts,
and government officials on the Energy Mix Radio Show.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Welcome to the Energy Mix Radio Show. I'm your guest
host today Mike Howard, and I have the distinct pleasure
of getting to interview Pierce Norton, the president and CEO
of One Oak. Pierce, how you doing today? Now?
Speaker 3 (00:30):
I'm doing great, Mike, and I really do appreciate you
having me on the show today. I'm looking forward to
our conversation. Well great, Well, the way I like to start.
My team is going to be watching this eventually, they
are going to laugh. Because the way I start most
of these conversations get to know somebody is where are
you from? And what's your birth order? My birth order
(00:54):
is one and one. I'm an only child from a
little place called heflin Alabama. I like to say it's
a two red light town. And I'm very very fortunate
to be where I am today. But what school at
University Alabama? Mechanical engineering degree and really got the good
(01:16):
fortune of starting out my career in the field. So
I worked in operations, construction, and engineering for basically thirteen years.
So I'd like to say that kind of shaped who
I am and who I got to work with and
my mentors.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
What area of Dell High did you work?
Speaker 3 (01:35):
I worked actually in East Texas for about three years.
I got transferred to the corporate office in Dallas, and
then I'd like to say that my boss was an
Aggie in Alabama. Played the Aggies on September fourteenth of
nineteen eighty five. We beat them, and then Monday morning
got transferred to.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Pacas, Texas. Gosh, Pacas is pretty pop for today, but
back then Pecas was not. It was pretty far out
of West Texas.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
Yeah, I think one thing distinguishes that, Mike, and it's
ten dollars crude while I was out there, So let's
just say it won the most booming place in the world.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
No, you know, I'm always curious. I come from a
very small town as well in South Texas. You know,
why did you choose mechanical engineering?
Speaker 3 (02:24):
You know, I think it is the most diverse engineering
curriculum and it allows you to you could go and
work in the space industry. You could work for free
do lay, you could work for a you know, a
paper mill, you could work in the oil and gas industry.
You can do just about anything. I call it the
Swiss Army Knife of engineering. And that's the reason I
(02:47):
chose that. These days, it seems to be harder and
harder to attract people in our industry, and we're always
looking for ways to attract people from small towns that
are looking for a great career. Are y'all doing anything
like that right now? We do. You know, we we
have a lot of programs around our organization where we
(03:08):
actually go into high schools.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
We put a lot of money even into some tech schools. Uh.
There's one up in Watford City, North Dakota that we
actually went in with the with the state and other
industry leaders and built a tech facility right beside the
Watfort City High School so people can see the transition.
You know, people usually gravitate to what they can see,
(03:33):
beautiful facility up there, great great curriculum.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
And so yeah, we do that, and I think it's
but the biggest thing is I think is telling people
and the young people, you know, what a purposeful or
uh industry this is and how important it is to
the country and our national security and our economic viability.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
I love that you mentioned your organization, you know, One Oak.
I've admired One O for a law long time, followed
you for a long time, mostly post COVID, just because
all of us in the energy business got you know,
hit pretty hard during COVID and post COVID. But if
I was meeting you, a lot of our listeners on
this radio show may not be in the energy business,
(04:16):
or they're at a different segment of the energy business.
Who is One Oak? What do you do? What are
your business lines?
Speaker 3 (04:22):
The simplest way I can explain this, Mike, is that
we touch a lot of molecules. And what I mean
by that is natural gas, ethane, propane isobutane, normal bututane, gasoline.
And now we're in the refined products business, which is
the motor gasolines, the jet fuels, the diesel, and the
(04:44):
crudal And so in its simplest form, what we do
is we want to touch as many molecules as we can,
as many times as we can, for as long as
we can, and we're moving these molecules to the point
where they're not as valuable to a point where they
are as valuable are more valuable. So that's that's in
(05:06):
a nutshell what it is we do. But we're in
the gathering, processing business, treating business. We're in the natural
gas intrast state interstate business. We're also in the natural
gas liquids business, fractionation business, refined products storage, and the
intercrude all gathering and transmission. So we touch about every
(05:27):
facet of the midstrame that you can touch.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
You know you started your career. I'm going to say that,
you know del High, I've met so many ex del
High employees that I know we in our past. I'm
sure we share a bunch of them. I would consider
that an unregulated business where it's kind of gathering and
processing of molecules out we're saying some of the businesses
you just mentioned are definitely more on the transmission regulated,
(05:55):
completely different looking business. Is that right?
Speaker 3 (05:59):
It is right, Mike. But those those molecules, you know,
they go through and touch all of those business segments
that each business segment has its has a little bit
of a unique business model. But then it's you know,
rarest form. We are a volume time for right company.
And then you've got certain regulations that you have on
(06:21):
others that you don't in other forms of our business.
But you know, we we navigate those the way we
do any any other thing. So it's all about the customers.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
Since two thousand and twenty one, you all have been
on a tremendous growth effort. It seemed like following you guys,
what was kind of the genesis of that or what
you know, if I think about your company, maybe talk
about the size that you were maybe around twenty twenty
and the size that you are today.
Speaker 3 (06:54):
Well, I'll even go back to when when we spun
out the utility out of one O Kayaks went with
that particular company, stayed with them for seven and a
half years. But just to give you some perspective, Mike,
when I left the company, our earnings are Evada was
about one point five billion dollars a year and today,
(07:16):
you know, our guidance for this year is around eight
point two two five billion, so tremendous amount of growth,
you know, just in the last fifteen years.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Uh. The way that all.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
Came about was, you know, we came Uh. One of
k has always been in a kind of a transformational
phase starting in the year two thousand when they started
turning more pivoting more away from the utility business and
more on the midstream side of the business. So they
did quite a few acquisitions, you know, in the early years.
(07:47):
And then we went through a period where because we
had all these these different assets in different areas, they
needed to be connected. And so we went through this
very large organic growth face.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (07:59):
And then when I came back from the utility in
twenty twenty one, it was time to really step back
a minute and assess where's this company going to go
for sustainability for the next decade. And so we sat
down as a management team. This was not you know,
just me, it was it was a collective group of
(08:20):
the people that led this company, and we sat down
and sided, you know, what are the key factors that
we need to address in order to get us to
where we need to be. We did that, we socialized
that with the board, and then we went to work.
You know, we kind of call it our our acquisition funnel.
We went then to work looking at what it is,
what companies might fit what we're looking for. And I'll
(08:42):
give you one great example in twenty twenty one, we
were pretty heavily tied to the baking area up in
North Dakota. Uh So, you know, you could see every
time crude old price went up or down, you know,
our stock price went up or down. So one of
the things that we wanted to do was diverse if
I diverse I into some different businesses and also diversify
(09:04):
into different geographical areas. And as we started looking at companies,
Magellan is the one that came to the forefront because
they had one point five billion in earnings and they
were spending less than one hundred million dollars a year
to do that. And you know, in the gathering and
processing business it's a continual reinvestment because of the decline
(09:25):
of the wells. So having a business with a lot
of cash flow would really set us up to even
do better on the gathering and the processing side. So
that's the one that we did first, and then we
went morphed into doing some of these other g and
p opportunities.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
Later.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
I would say that we wouldn't be in the gathering
business of crude had we not had done Magellan, because
we wouldn't have had the long haul pipes for that
and Our whole model is about connectivity and the interconnection
between our businesses.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
And Pierce, give me a sense of size of when
you say Magell and Magellan was a company doing very
well on its own and just so happy you're both
I think Tulsa based companies. You know, But what what
was the size of what o versus the size Magell
and what was the size of that that acquisition.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
Well, the size of of one. It was larger than Magellan,
but not materially. I mean, it was a very large
acquisition force, you know, and you know that's uh. What
made it a little bit easier and and tough was
the fact that our corporate offices were both in the
(10:37):
city of Tulsa. A lot of times, if you're looking
to consolidate things into a corporate office and you buy
something that's that's in another it has another corporate office
in another city, then you lose a lot of people
because because you don't you know, when you when you
tip transfer people, then they don't want to move. This
(10:57):
one was kind of right the opposite of that. Everybody,
and we were very fortunate that we didn't have to
actually at trip many people in putting them together. It
was the things that you would normally see is you
don't need two C suites. We have some overlap, you
know in ir you have some overlap in accounting those
kind of things. But it was basically untouched in the field.
(11:19):
But one OK was larger than Magellan, But Magellan was
very critical as to d One of the things I
would say is that scale Magellan was big enough to
make an impact, and that was one of the things
we were looking for. We didn't want to just do
something small. We wanted to do something that was meaningful
for our shareholders.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
We're going to take a break here real quick, and
I want to come back and I want to hit
you up on talking about doing some sort of It's
almost like a merger of equals there whenever you think
about that size of acquisition and talk through that a
little bit. But right now you're listening to the Energy
Mix radio show with your guest host Mike Howard.
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Speaker 2 (13:02):
All right, welcome back. You're listening to the Energy Mix,
the radio show with your guest host Mike Howard, and
I have the pleasure of visiting with Pierce Norton, the
CEO of One Oak. Pierce, we just talked through a
major acquisition that your company did in the last few years.
Tell me some more of the other acquisition you had
(13:23):
that was Magellan and One Oat combined to almost double
size your company. It's sounded like, what else have you
done since twenty twenty one?
Speaker 3 (13:30):
So we also did something called the Eastern Assets. That
was something that we'd actually been looking at even prior
to prior to doing Magellan, but it was just a
must to have once we did Magellan. Because we did
the Eastern Assets actually connects the two together. It connects
(13:54):
our mind Bellevue facilities, which is all of our storage
of all of our liquid you know, utane's gasolines UH
and then being able to connect those over to basically
East Houston to the Galena Park UH into UH what
we call MVP, which is the Pasadena facility. Then we
(14:15):
can now connect those and use those for some blending
opportunities that we didn't have before. One thing I would
tell you that we we learned through the Magellan acquisition.
We had a pretty good handle on the well head
to the downstream, you know, to the end of the frack,
but we really didn't understand how much value there was
(14:38):
past the fractionation facility. And that's what we've learned UH
with UH with Magellan. Easton was one. Then we went
on and moved into in Link, which was a gathering
of processing business. The way I like to describe this
is we actually had a considerable amount of liquids coming
from those processing plants into our NGO business.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (14:59):
But what in link act is the capability to compete
on a full value strength. So they have the gathering
and the processing, but they didn't have the NGLs to
take away and the fractionation, so they were using us
for some of that stuff. But to be able to
take all the areas, which was basically mid con North Texas,
(15:21):
Permian and then over into Louisiana, be able to connect
all of those Now we had bridges between all those
islands and it's really working out well for UCE.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
Yeah, amazing. You have said something that piqued my interest.
Downstream of fractionation. What is downstream of fractionation.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
Downstream of fractionation is what else you can do to
combine those products with the refined products. Refined products primarily
come off of the you know, off of the refineries,
but there's things that you can do to enhance those
products with the products that you get from the NGL business.
(16:05):
And so we weren't able to take advantage of those
kind of things in the past. Until we put these
two companies together.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
Yeah, one of the things that we've experienced, just to
give the listeners a sense of kind of what we're
talking about. If you go back to say two thousand
and five, and the US was using let's say around
eighteen TCF of natural gas today to today the US
(16:36):
is using closer to forty forty one tcf. In that growth,
there's a lot of these natural gas liquids that come
out of the gas. Has other businesses grown to absorb that.
We know where the natural gas is going. It's going
to power plants and also to LNG exports. Where are
(16:56):
these natural gas liquids going.
Speaker 3 (16:58):
Well, first of all, you're heading on the topic that
I really like to talk about. These NGL liquids are
going primarily to the petrochemical industries. Okay, well, but not
that's There's been a tremendous amount of owned shoring coming
from petricams building those facilities in the Gulf coast over
the last fifteen years. So a lot of those liquids
(17:20):
are absorbed there, but you have to go down each
one of them. That's primarily the ethnane. The propane is
pretty much at a in a domestic sense at equilibrium,
So to the extent that you have more propane than
you can consume domestically, that's got to go over the water.
But ASIA is going to drive a lot of that
(17:42):
in the future. They're going to basically Asia is going
to drive the crudal increases that we have in this country.
They're going to also take the LPGs and the legies
all of us. So Asia is going to be very
important to the success of this industry. But you know,
you just mentioned the the eighteen TCF and the forty
(18:04):
one t c F. You know, it's it's going to
really increase. And I'll go to BCF numbers now, but
you're looking at you're taking talking about ten BCF of
additional law LNG capacity, you know, localfied natural gas export
capacity in the United States just over the next five years.
(18:25):
And then you've got artificial intelligence. Well we haven't even
touched on that yet. Uh, that could probably be going
to get there, trust me, three to eight you know
bcf a day. So those numbers are going to really
drive up the number of tcfs that are being used,
are consumed here, are you know, produced here in the
(18:46):
United States.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
So it's a.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
It's an exciting time, but I also it's kind of
a quiet period. You know, between two thousand and seven
and ten, you still only got up to about twenty TCFU,
But then all of a sudden, you've started taking over
and in like a period of twenty ten to twenty
twenty two twenty twenty four, we actually increased to about
(19:10):
seventeen bcf a day just on coal plant conversions with
natural gas to taken over the coals up. So natural
gas is playing a major major role here in the
United States.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
Probably starting nerding out. I'm a chemical engineer by trade,
and so I just love the numbers side of the business.
And what I've learned is where I'm trying to advocate
for our industry, people get lost in some of these numbers.
But it's just shocking the growth that our industry has
experienced really in the last ten years. And really the
(19:46):
demand for our products was relatively flat for quite a
few years. Yes, there was coal switching going on, but
now we're seeing a resurgence of demand that's kind of
unprecedented in the velocity that we're seeing as a demand
for our industry. So when we come back here after
(20:08):
a commercial break, we're going to talk about what is
driving that demand increase. That's kind of I believe at
unprecedented levels. So with that, you're listening to the Energy
Mix radio show.
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Speaker 2 (21:22):
All right, welcome back to the Energy Mix radio show
with your guest host Mike Howard, and have the pleasure
of speaking to Pierce Thornton, the CEO of One Oak. So, Pierce,
we just talked about where the natural gas business and
a lot of liquids business in our industry has grown
over last ten to twenty years. What's driving that growth today?
Speaker 3 (21:44):
That the growth today, Mike, is being driven primarily by
liquefied natural gas facilities. Right now, there's five facilities that
are currently being built. So there's about fourteen bcf day
of lngxport facility here in the United States. That's going
to grow by about another ten bcf a day. Uh
(22:06):
and it's mainly on the Gulf Coast. So of the
five facilities that are being built right now, four of
them are in Texas. But then there's another seven or
so that are on the board that are potentially going
to be f i D you know, in the next
five years for the next wave, and most of those
are going to be in the Louisiana area. And what
(22:26):
we're excited about is through our inn Link acquisition, we
picked up a lot of assets in Louisiana and we're
actually expanding our storage feels down there. We're really excited
about that because if you look at the expansion of
the amount of natural gas that's going in that's being
produced in the United States, storage really hasn't grown that much.
(22:47):
You know, it's it was around four point four tcf,
it's now around four point eight. But I believe we're
going to need a lot more because we're going to
have so much more gas. And storage is what balance
is everything out when things don't work exactly the way
you want them to, you know, as far as an
LNG plant going down or whatever. The other thing that's
(23:08):
driving it is the is the uh is AI data centers.
We went for almost twenty years MIKE without any increase
in the in the consumption. I call them quads of
energy UH for for electric generation, and it was is
held pretty flat. We're now starting to see growth in
(23:28):
that area and it's driven by the by the AI
Data centers. And then you're going to continue to probably
have some level of gas you know, coal to gas
switching UH but it's probably going to be minimized because
there may be such an insatiable appetite for electricity that
many of these coal plants that they may have decided
(23:49):
to shut down, they may not shut down now first
quite some time because of that energy demand.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
One of the sayings that we like to say around
here is that you know, energy is thermodynamically linked to GDP,
meaning that in developing economies especially, but once the economy
becomes developed like the US, it's it's pretty flat, like
you're mentioning for the last twenty years, you kind of
get an equilibrium where you can still grow GDP but
(24:16):
not necessarily have to use more energy. And what you're
describing with with l G export and with AI, that is,
if I did my math right here, that is an
additional twenty four BCF. And if you're producing I think
you said something about one hundred BCF right now. Basically
(24:37):
in the US twenty forty one TCF is around one
hundred bcf masa menos, So a twenty four percent increase
And what timeframe is that.
Speaker 3 (24:46):
It's probably going to be between now and say twenty
thirty twenty thirty five.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
Wow, that is in America's history that quite possibly we're
talking about post World War two time velocities here. It
feels like it does.
Speaker 3 (25:02):
It does, But I tell you the natural gas. But
to put it in perspective, in twenty and sixteen, we
were actually looking at importing energy into this country, and
then by twenty sixteen we started export. So we've actually
only been exporting natural gas out of this country in
(25:23):
a meaningful way since twenty and sixteen. That's phenomenal growth.
You know, just just to get to fourteen billion qb
feet a day is a standing because, like you said, Mike,
you kind of get to equilibrium, you know when you
look at because natural gas is used for electricity generation issues,
for residential areas, commercial industrial loads, and then a little
(25:48):
bit into transportation. But it is you know, we use
the term Swiss army knife. It is the Swiss Army
knife of energy.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
Natural gas is well great when we come We're going
to continue the conversation with Pier Snort and the CEO
of One Oak. You listen to the Energy Mix radio show.
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Speaker 2 (27:22):
All right, Welcome back. This is the Energy Mixed Radio
Show with your guest host Mike Howard, and today we're
speaking to Pierce Norton, the CEO of One Oak. Pierce.
One of the things that we share in common is
we've you currently working with in Link employees and I
at one time worked at a predecessor in Link Cross
(27:42):
tex Energy, cross Tech Energy. It is such a great
time working there that they actually helped start up Howard
Energy Partners. They're one of my original equity investors, which
is kind of an odd way to start a company
that actually helped a competitor get started. But you know,
we were we were in South Texas and they didn't
(28:03):
have a South Texas presence and that's why they did it.
But I have some fond memories of your employees in
Louisiana and hopefully some of them are listening to this
radio show right now, and mostly because of the culture.
And as I can imagine, you've had One Oak, which
is a how old is one Oak?
Speaker 3 (28:20):
Remind me it is around one hundred and twenty years old.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
You have a one hundred and twenty year energy company
in one Oak. Combined with Magellan, then you take in Link.
That feels like a lot of cultures coming together. And
as we talk about attracting and retaining talent in our industry,
you know, how do you integrate that culture whenever you're
(28:47):
changing so much and so fast? Because Obviously, if you
have one hundred and twenty year old culture, it's got
to be good or else you it would have gone
away a long time ago. So how's that integration in
your mind? How do you think it?
Speaker 3 (29:01):
So, the biggest challenge that we have when it comes
to integration is what I would call prioritization, because everybody's
excited about two companies coming together. You wouldn't have put
these companies together had they not have been greater together
than either one of them were a part. Aaron Milfern
and I used to talk about that a lot with
(29:22):
the employees when we were going through the you know,
the acquisition of Magellan, and we truly truly believe that.
But what the way you process that is you have
to break it down into three areas. The first one
is you've got to stabilize the organization.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
Uh. What I mean by that is.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
You you've got to send a clear message that you've
got to maintain safe and reliable day to day operations.
You got to over communicate, you know, gotta you got
to tell them what you know and what you don't know, uh,
and do it a lot.
Speaker 2 (29:57):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
And then you've got to be visible uh And that's
the whole goal there is to build trust. And then
the third piece or the second piece of this is
to integrate. So you got to set your org structure up.
You got to facilitate people getting together because that's the
way the ideas are born. And then you got to
have decisions on your systems. We all have a bunch
of systems that run these different companies, and many times
(30:20):
when you put two together, they may not be the same.
So you've got to make decisions are we going to
go with one or the other? And then the last
of them is to transform the organization because you want
to take advantage of the successes in both cultures or
whatever culture you're adding to it, and not be so
stuck in your ways that you say, well, our way
(30:41):
is the only way. So it's all about innovation. It's
about the employees coming together and finding a better way
to do it than maybe we've done it in the past.
But that's kind of on the tail end. If you
don't stabilize and integrate first, you don't ever get to
the transformation phase.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
You started in the field like I did. I worked
in the field for ten years and I see as
I follow one oak and see some of your messaging.
You go to the field quite a bit. What's that
feel like? Because you know, whatever I was in the field,
I would look at these executives come out of their
ivory tower and really question their authenticity and stuff. How
(31:19):
do you feel like going in the field these days
and how are you connecting with people?
Speaker 3 (31:24):
Well, what's unique about my story is I work for
eight different companies and all eight of those companies actually
have they own either one ok oonnes either the entire corporation,
or they own the majority of the assets. So when
I go to the field, I'm going home A lot
(31:44):
of times, I'm going back to see people that if
I'm lucky enough, there's people that are still there that
I work with forty two years ago. And that's a
special time for me because I always have a real
special I like to people ask me, well, how's the
weather today? And I say, well, where I was, it
was seventy degrees. But I can guarantee our feeld people
(32:07):
they don't work in seventy degree weather every day. They
work maybe up in North Dakota minus sixty and maybe
one hundred and ten to one hundred and fifteen, you know,
down to summer West Texas areas. So I just have
a deep appreciation for what they do. If you've done
that work before, you know it. It doesn't always go
the way that you think it's going to go, and
(32:28):
it never ends. We move these products twenty four hours
a day and it's the feel people that make that happen.
Anytime I get a chance to go out and thank
our field people for what they do, it's the reason
I have a job. And if they didn't do what
they do, none of us would be here. And we
also had to build on the backs of those that
(32:49):
came before us, and it's our responsibility to make sure
that we make decisions that the next generation has the
same opportunity that we do. I just have a real
passion for what it is that our people in the
field do. They are the core, the foundation.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
Of the company. I couldn't agree more. We had our
town hall yesterday. I try to model our company after
great companies like y'all and trying to connect to where
the real war. I always say, where the real work
happens clicking on a keyboard. Sometimes this doesn't give the
same satisfaction as getting to hear a compressor startup, or
pumps run, or gas flowing through pipes. They just it
(33:31):
gives you a better sense that we're actually doing real
work out here. You know, Well, if you've ever.
Speaker 3 (33:36):
Gone out in the middle of the field, Mike, and
you know you've done this before, and it's nothing but
maybe a corn field, and when you leave, you know
there's this giant processing facility, compression facilities, and all the
pieces and parts that make that work, and the people
that put the effort into making a it's just an
incredible I wish most Americans could see what it is
(33:58):
that our field people do. I think they would appreciate
the energy when they turned their lights on a whole
lot more. You mentioned town hall. We just did our
town hall actually from Lafayette, Louisiana, so I got to
experience the culture down there firsthand, and you're right there,
second to none.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
That was that was my area when I worked at
cross Tex which is in Link which you acquired. So
that Flacaman's planned there in Baton Rouge and down in
Homa and in Lafayette. We you know, I've been in
those areas and I know some of those guys that
that is a that and that just storage facility that
you have now natural gas storage as Probably my favorite
(34:36):
parts of my career is getting to work in South
Louisiana and getting to enjoy their food and culture in
that area.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
But most people don't know that just is in the
middle of the lake. So went down there. They actually
took me out on a boat, you know, to see
the well heads out there. It's it's incredible.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
Well, we're going to take a break and when we
come back, we're going to talk about energy advocacy. You're
listening to the Energy Mix radio show.
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Speaker 2 (36:12):
All right, welcome back. You're listening to the Energy Mix
radio show with your guest host Mike Howard, and today
we're visiting with Pierce Norton, the CEO of One Oak. Pierce.
One of the things we talked about earlier was AI Uh.
That's an easy thing to say, but you can't have
a conversation in our industry without hearing about the demand
(36:32):
for energy. You can't read a new segment without hearing
about chat GPT and how it's transforming so many other industries.
We understand it from an energy standpoint, we're also using
it inside of our companies, and so I want to
talk a little bit about just AI inside of one
oak and what you're doing operationally with it, but then
(36:53):
also from the energy usage standpoint, and you've already mentioned
some of the demand coming with AI, but talk about
what is real and what is it real? So let's
just start with the operations of what oak. What do
y'all use an AI for in your business?
Speaker 3 (37:09):
Well, there's two main areas right now, Mike, that we're
using it in. One is in our refined products business,
but we're using AI to basically monitor electrical loads across
the country and we can actually predict when spikes and
energy prices are going to happen. And that is a
particular business because we have tankage on both ends of
(37:33):
the of the pipes we can actually store and it
allows us to stop the pumps, which means that we
aren't using electricity. So when we see these energy spikes
coming through this AI data analysis, we can literally shut
down pumps in our system and avoid those extra cost
which really just go right to the bottom line into
(37:54):
our shareholders. So that's one way that we're using it.
The other way, i'd like to explain this and you
know this because you've been in the business, but we
just have millions and millions of data points coming in
through scat of systems every day, so we're literally drowning
in data. But what we thirst for is the intelligence
(38:15):
and the knowledge that comes from that data, and AI
is the super computing is going to give us the
capability to literally assess that information that normal humans just
could not get through in the past.
Speaker 2 (38:30):
So I'm really.
Speaker 3 (38:32):
Excited about that. You can use it, you know, in
your fractionation facilities, these distillation towers because you've got pressures
and temperatures there. You mentioned there's a chemical engineer, so
I'm probably really talking your language here, but you know,
being able to squeeze out just another five or ten
percent efficiency can be very meaningful to our industry.
Speaker 2 (38:53):
Well that that's exactly why we have so much data
coming in, and how to organize that data into some
sort of key performance indicator that you can actually run
a business on, you know, like that's kind of the
holy grail. It feels like if you can get all
this real time data because we're twenty four to seven
in this industry, and so for how is that you know,
(39:13):
we always our business has been viewed in the past
potentially as a business that's going away that it's maybe
even a dirty business, that it's it's not particularly innovative.
How are you attracting employees when you're talking to college
students and I know you do a lot of work
in that sort of way of attracting people and you're
(39:35):
into the industry is exciting for them? Is that one
of the tools you're using to bring people in to
show like how innovative our industry is.
Speaker 3 (39:44):
That's one might be in you know, you mentioned innovation.
That's actually one of our core values. So the you know,
we have six core values. We have you know, safety
and the environmental ethics, we have inclusion and diversity, we
have innovation and uh and service is one of our pages.
(40:06):
But what we found out is that the younger generation
really gleans onto innovation and they glean onto service. They're
very willing to give back to the communities and that's
something that's very very important to us here at one Oak.
The biggest thing we can do is focus on the
employees that we have because they are ambassadors. They're the
(40:27):
ones that go back home, they're the ones that talk
to their families, they're the ones that talk that are
friends and churches in baseball and and you know, different
different sports leagues that they're in for the kids. And
so I always tell everybody that we want you to
truly feel like this is a place that you just
can't can't do without. We spend more time here than
(40:50):
we do with our own families, and so we want
it to be where the rest of the world may
not know exactly what we're doing here at One Oak,
but I like to say that people say, I want
some of that, and so that's the that's the culture
and the attitude that we're trying to achieve here at
one OH.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
I love that it feels like a higher purpose. It
feels like, you know the way you describe it, that
your employees know that they are work for a higher purpose.
That gets into energy advocacy. And we only have probably
about three minutes left, but like I noticed a lot
of your vocabulary, it really transcends politics and that sort
(41:29):
of thing. It really gets into the issue of of
of getting more energy to more people. How do how
do you talk about that to groups that don't have
a perception of our industry? But how do you promote
our industry from that? From that way?
Speaker 3 (41:43):
Well, I promote it and really. You mentioned the word purpose, Mike,
I think that's that's a that's a very powerful word
in our industry because what we do, uh, it drives
the way we move as a society. It drives the
way we live as a society. It drives the way
that we communicate, and now with AI, it's driving the
(42:03):
way that we learn.
Speaker 2 (42:05):
All of that.
Speaker 3 (42:06):
Takes an enormous amount of energy. But the way that
I like to talk about it is to use examples.
So if I'm talking to an employee that's working in
the gathering business for a crude in the permium basin,
I can literally tell them that you actually have been
able to enable somebody from Denver, Colorado to go to Munich,
(42:29):
Germany on an Airbus three eighty. And the reason I
say that is you can trace that molecule all the
way from the permium basin, all the way through our system,
all the way up to Denver, Colorado, because we have
ninety five percent of the jet fuel in the Dia
Airport comes from US Luftanza. They actually just announced the
flight from Denver to Munich. The thing holds five hundred
(42:52):
and eight people. But what people don't know is it
holds eighty four thousand gallons of jet fuel. You can
fill up five thousand normal cars with what one jet
consumes in jet fuel just going from Denver to Munich.
So you know the purpose. It really energy bridges innovation
(43:13):
with accessibility at scale, and accessibility at scale generates opportunity.
And that's what's so exciting to me about our industry,
and I think that's what excites our young people and
all of our employees.
Speaker 2 (43:26):
I love that, Pierce, you are an inspiration to a
lot of us in the business and everything that you've done.
We've got about forty seconds left. Give us something inspirational
here to send this out of working in this business.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
Well, I would say this is not necessarily coming from me.
I've been very fortunate to have great mentors, great leaders
that push me to challenge me. And the best way
I can probably explain this is just to give you
a little bit of it. Advice of what they gave me.
The first one is have fun. The second one is bluemore.
(44:07):
You're planted a lot of times. This business will take
you to some various places in the world, and you just.
Speaker 2 (44:13):
You enjoy it when you're there.
Speaker 3 (44:15):
Another advice I got was it's a pretty fat, pretty
flat pancake that doesn't have two sites. That just tells
you that, you know, there's always another side to the story.
When you hear somebody coming at you or whatever, try
to understand their point of view. And then the last
two I'd give you as many lessons learned will have
to be relearned without open communication and knowledge sharing. I
(44:39):
think that's very important in our industry. And the last
one is as a leader, give clear direction and then
trust your people to do their job.
Speaker 2 (44:46):
Piers, thank you for being with us today. You've been
very gracious with your time. I'm your host, Mike Howard.
This is the Energy Mix Radio Show.
Speaker 1 (44:54):
The Energy Mix Radio Show is where we explore topics
that affect us all in the oil and gas industry.
Every week week, our host will interview the movers and
shakers in this fast paced industry. You'll hear from industry experts,
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Amy Robach & T.J. Holmes present: Aubrey O’Day, Covering the Diddy Trial
Introducing… Aubrey O’Day Diddy’s former protege, television personality, platinum selling music artist, Danity Kane alum Aubrey O’Day joins veteran journalists Amy Robach and TJ Holmes to provide a unique perspective on the trial that has captivated the attention of the nation. Join them throughout the trial as they discuss, debate, and dissect every detail, every aspect of the proceedings. Aubrey will offer her opinions and expertise, as only she is qualified to do given her first-hand knowledge. From her days on Making the Band, as she emerged as the breakout star, the truth of the situation would be the opposite of the glitz and glamour. Listen throughout every minute of the trial, for this exclusive coverage. Amy Robach and TJ Holmes present Aubrey O’Day, Covering the Diddy Trial, an iHeartRadio podcast.
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