Nearly thirty years ago, Kelcy Warren helped build a pipeline company out of roughly 200 miles of gas line in East Texas. Today that company, Energy Transfer LP, is leading a different kind of expansion: away from the New York Stock Exchange and toward a two-year-old exchange based a few miles from its own Dallas headquarters.

Energy Transfer confirmed this month that it will transfer its primary listing to the Texas Stock Exchange, with shares expected to begin trading on TXSE on October 5. Three related companies are joining the move: Sunoco LP, SunocoCorp LLC and USA Compression Partners LP. There’s no new ticker to learn and no trading gap to bridge, just a change of address for nearly $100 billion in combined market value.

From Pipeline Builder to Exchange Backer

Kelcy Warren’s fingerprints are on this deal for more than one reason. Records tied to TXSE Group’s SEC Form 1 filing show that Warren, through his entity Kelcy Warren Partners, owns roughly a third of the exchange’s parent company, more than any other shareholder, including TXSE’s own chief executive. That places Kelcy Warren at the center of two overlapping roles: executive chairman of the company doing the listing, and largest owner of the exchange receiving it.

That path from East Texas pipeline crews to Dallas boardrooms has been well documented by the Texas Business Hall of Fame, which traced his climb through Cornerstone Natural Gas before he and Ray Davis founded Energy Transfer in 1996.

D CEO’s 2023 feature on Warren detailed how a string of opportunistic acquisitions, including the purchase of Sunoco’s retail fuel business, helped build the company into one of the nation’s largest energy infrastructure operators.

A Milestone Two Years in the Making

TXSE Chairman and CEO James Lee, quoted by the Dallas Business Journal, framed the announcement in broader terms than a single listing swap. “Companies across the U.S. are reevaluating where they are headquartered, where they are legally domiciled, and where they list,” Lee said. “Texas has built a complete business ecosystem with advantages across all three.”

Combined, Energy Transfer and its three sibling companies represent close to $100 billion in market capitalization, the largest single bloc of value TXSE has attracted since it opened. Full SEC approval was granted in the fall of 2025, and trading began in phases last July.

Texas Capital Bancshares said separately this month, as first reported by The Dallas Morning News, that it will move its own listing from Nasdaq to TXSE in November, a sign that Energy Transfer’s decision has already started to shape how other Texas companies think about where they trade.

For Kelcy Warren, the listing win adds a new chapter to a career that already includes membership in the Horatio Alger Association and a board seat on the University of Texas System Board of Regents, to which Governor Greg Abbott reappointed him last year. After September’s announcement, the exchange he helped finance now carries that company into its next chapter, too.