Those who follow the business world’s biggest names should be following Kelcy Warren if they are not doing so already. Warren is the chairman and chief executive officer of Energy Transfer Partners, an immensely successful energy and pipeline company he co-founded in 1996. He is also one of the roughly 735 billionaires in the U.S. and he is a 2016 Horatio Alger Award recipient, an award that recognizes the achievements of business leaders who have accomplished a great deal in the face of adversity. But there is so much more behind why the association, founded in 1947, chose him over other candidates.
Why the Horatio Alger Association Awarded Kelcy Warren the 2016 Horatio Alger Award
Factors that the Horatio Alger Award Association considered when making Kelcy Warren a Horatio Alger Award recipient in 2016 included his background, education, and desire to succeed in everything he was involved in, from a teenager in high school and a young adult in college to C-level roles with enormously successful companies in the natural gas industry. Born in 1955, Warren grew up the son of a father who worked as a ditch digger and gauger and a loving mother who worked in a department store. He and his siblings didn’t have much growing up, and because of that, their parents always impressed upon them the importance of finishing high school and earning a college degree. And that’s precisely what he and at least one of his siblings did.
After completing high school, Warren earned a scholarship to work on a research project sponsored by the National Science Foundation, which enabled him to attend the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). That project had to do with methane gas production. According to Warren, that project instilled in him a level of confidence and desire to compete with others that he never knew existed in him. Further, it motivated him to work hard to earn his degree and join the workforce. In 1978, he received his civil engineering degree from UTA, and he soon began working as a pipeline design engineer for Lone Star Gas in Dallas, Texas before joining a small energy development company called Endevco three years later.
In 1992, Warren and a business partner acquired Endevco and renamed it Cornerstone Natural Gas before selling it only four years later. Following the sale, Kelcy Warren co-founded Energy Transfer, the same energy and pipeline company most people associate him with today. Despite challenges as a teenager and young adult, Kelcy Warren still found success in both school and business. And that perfectly explains why he was a 2016 Horatio Alger Award recipient.
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Learn more about Warren on https://littlesis.org/person/5729-Kelcy_Warren