SpaceX Plans Gas Pipeline Weeks After Nasdaq Listing

SpaceX will begin building an eight mile natural gas pipeline in Texas next month, shortly after its debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange on June 12.

The pipeline, named Starpipe, will end at the company's Starbase launch complex in South Texas and is expected to be operational by January 26, according to a filing with the Texas Railroad Commission by SpaceX affiliate Lone Star Mineral Development.

The project tackles a fundamental bottleneck in Starship operations. Each launch of the world's largest rocket consumes approximately 630,000 gallons of liquid methane, currently delivered by hundreds of tanker trucks in a process that takes several hours and is incompatible with the launch rates SpaceX is targeting.

Engineering plans SpaceX filed with the United States Army Corps of Engineers show the company intends to build a liquefaction facility at Starbase to convert piped natural gas into liquid methane on site. William Farrar, a Texas oil and gas lawyer and geoscientist, said the approach would make "the most efficient sense."

SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell told CNBC on June 12, when the company went public, that SpaceX planned to build pipelines, produce its own propellant and investigate drilling for its own natural gas. Cameron County land records show the company has signed more than 100 oil and gas leases with Texas property owners since 2023.

However, Stan Lindsey, an oil and gas consultant in Texas, said extracting natural gas would be a challenging pursuit for a company with no oil and gas experience, and described Starpipe as a practical fallback if the drilling ambitions prove out of reach.

Starpipe will begin on an 83 acre parcel at the Port of Brownsville that SpaceX is negotiating to lease from the city for 50 years, according to a port official who spoke anonymously because the talks are private.

The push into fuel infrastructure reflects Starship's expanding role. The rocket is central to SpaceX's drive to expand the Starlink broadband network, deploy orbital artificial intelligence data centre satellites and eventually carry astronauts to the Moon and Mars.