After more than two decades running Energy Transfer, Kelcy Warren stepped down as chief executive in 2020. He remains executive chairman and chairman of the board, but daily operations now fall to co-CEOs Mackie McCrea and Tom Long.

McCrea first joined the company in 1997, a year after Warren and co-founder Ray Davis launched Energy Transfer with roughly 200 miles of pipeline in Texas. He most recently served as president and commercial officer before stepping into the co-CEO role. Long, meanwhile, was promoted from chief financial officer, a position he had held since 2016.

A Culture That Outlasts One Leader

Warren has described Energy Transfer‘s culture as entrepreneurial to its core, saying the company plans to keep growing until it no longer exists. That mindset, he suggests, does not depend on any one person staying in the top operating role. Colleagues describe frequent informal gatherings in Warren’s office, where employees exchange ideas and business plans even now that he has stepped back from daily management.

The transition came after a run of major acquisitions, including Sunoco in 2012, Southern Union in 2011, and Enable Midstream in 2021, that built Energy Transfer into a company moving nearly a third of the nation’s natural gas and crude oil. Revenue peaked near $90 billion in 2022, a record for the company.

Kelcy Warren, who holds a civil engineering degree from the University of Texas at Arlington, still weighs in on major decisions as chairman. But the shift to McCrea and Long reflects a deliberate effort to institutionalize a growth approach that Kelcy Warren built largely through instinct and speed over nearly thirty years.

Even after the pandemic’s demand shock in 2020, which Warren has described as a genuinely strange period when jet fuel and oil demand collapsed while natural gas held steadier, the leadership transition proceeded on schedule. The company weathered that stretch and went on to post record revenue two years later, a result Warren credits to the team he left in place rather than to any single decision of his own. Read this article for additional information.

Find more information about Kelcy Warren on https://www.forbes.com/profile/kelcy-warren/