Jensen Plants a Foothold for Atlas Energy’s Dune Express

For Atlas Energy Solutions, delivering frac sand from its mine in Kermit, Texas, to well sites in Lea County, New Mexico, presented ongoing logistical challenges. The constant parade of trucks running the 180 mile round trip proved inefficient and expensive, caused increased levels of pollution, and resulted in higher than normal accident rates.

Atlas Energy addressed this challenge by designing an innovative above ground 42 mile electric conveyor system that can deliver 13 million tons of sand to two storage and loadout facilities near the well sites without ever touching a roadway. The facilities represent more than 84,000 tons of vertical frac sand storage. Developing the longest conveyor system in the United States required years of planning, testing, permitting, and land lease negotiations for a game changing frac sand delivery system.

The actual construction process of the ambitious Dune Express, as it’s called, brought its own unique set of logistical challenges. The structure needed thousands of precast concrete footings and a series of precast tunnels to enable the conveyor to pass under county roads.

As planning progressed, Atlas Energy sought a precast concrete company with the capacity and logistical expertise to ensure a smooth construction process. They selected Jensen Infrastructure. With its large footprint throughout the US Southwest and West Coast, Jensen has both the manufacturing capability and the logistical expertise to handle a project of this size and complexity. Jensen’s Tucson, Arizona, facility was tabbed to cast the conveyor footings, and its Las Vegas, Nevada, facility handled the underground work.

“We supplied 11,460 footings for the Dune Express,” says Adam Bergman, Jensen Tucson General Manager. Called sleepers, the original design of the footings came from Atlas Energy. The Jensen team then worked with equipment suppliers Afinitas to build custom formwork. “The customer gave us the design they were looking for,” Bergman says, “and we gave it to our engineers and Afinitas. We worked with Afinitas to create a gang mold so we could pour three sleepers at a time.”

Bergman dedicated a three-person crew to casting the sleepers. They were able to produce 120 per day, or 600 per week, ultimately shaving two weeks from the schedule. Casting started in October 2023 and finished in March 2024. Once the forms were ready, there was some trial and error at first, but the Tucson team doubled down to get the right amount of turns needed each day.

“Essentially, we won the project because we committed to making at least 500 sleepers a week,” Bergman says. After nailing down the production details, Bergman and his team needed to figure out the shipping logistics. The sleepers are 12.25″W x 6.975’L x 10″H, weighing in at 707 lbs each. Loading the pieces onto pallets turned out to be the most efficient way to ship.

“It was a little unique to us, because we don’t palletize most of our pieces,” Bergman says. “We had some challenges. We had to get with a pallet supplier to make sure each pallet could hold 14,000 pounds.”

With the Tucson facility located 6 to 7 hours from the conveyor construction site, trucking became another logistical hurdle. With 60 units on four pallets per truck, that’s 191 loads that needed to be delivered. Add to that another 10,000 linear feet of barrier deliveries for the tunnel portion of the project.

“Luckily the Interstate 10 thoroughfare is pretty well traveled so it wasn’t super challenging to find trucks,” Bergman says. “They had different laydown areas along the path of the conveyor. So they would give us certain longitude and latitude coordinates to drop that week’s deliveries.”

Not a nightmare, but challenging

The logistics were a bit more complicated at Jensen’s Las Vegas facility, which supplied four-sided box culvert sections for 21 road crossings where the conveyor travels underground.

“Production-wise, it’s a small team to produce the pieces, but logistics-wise, it takes a lot of different hands in the kitchen,” says Greg Taylor, Jensen Las Vegas General Manager. “The Las Vegas portion of the project included 200 culvert sections in Phase 1 and 110 pieces in Phase 2. The number of pieces delivered to each crossing would vary, depending on the size of the road.”

The boxes are 10’W x 6’L x 8’H, with a 10″ wall thickness. Section length was trimmed from the standard 8′ to 6′ to accommodate 40,000 lb trucking weight limits. Each box weighs about 31,000 lbs, which means shipping just one piece per truck for the long haul from Vegas to Southern New Mexico.

“Shipping something 30 miles away, compared to 1,000 miles away, is not a nightmare, but it’s a little more challenging,” Taylor says. “That’s our biggest constraint in the delivery of the sections – locating trucks locally through brokers to haul the pieces. Because it’s not like the driver can get there in one day. It’s a two-day trip just to get there.”

The Jensen Las Vegas project management staff worked closely with the Jensen Tucson team, which worked with Atlas Energy project managers to keep things moving and make sure all the right deliveries made it to the correct locations at the proper time.

“Atlas had a crane waiting onsite to offload the trucks,” Taylor says. “We don’t want to have cranes sitting there doing nothing. It takes a little bit more caressing to make sure we’re all on the same page. There were lots of emails going back and forth on the days when we’re shipping.”

When the $400 million Dune Express launched in January 2025, it was the culmination of five years of planning, custom design, testing, and the clearing of logistical hurdles for a totally unique project that will create enormous efficiencies for Atlas Energy and transform the corridor between Kermit, Texas, and Lea County, New Mexico, from a crowded trucking route to a cleaner, safer byway for travelers.

Jensen honored its Tucson and Las Vegas facilities with a 2023 Project of the Year Award for their work on the Dune Express. The recognition was well deserved.

If your project calls for high quality engineering and manufacturing, not to mention unique logistics, contact Jensen Infrastructure today.