Forty Under 40: Drew Ward, Pinnacle Midstream

Drew Ward, partner and chief commercial officer at Houston-based Pinnacle Midstream II LLC, is today’s featured Forty Under 40 honoree.

Trust, Ward says, is a significant aspect of what drove the Pinnacle I team, after the company was successfully monetized to Eagleclaw Midstream in 2018, to stick together and found Pinnacle II. He notes that “it’s very rare for a team to stay together after a monetization … [and that] his team had the trust in each other to continue to execute” as a new company.

His valuation of trust shows in Pinnacle II’s prioritization of safety at all levels of business and operation. As Ward insists, he and his team share a mentality of “people first, then everything else.” People’s “lives and livelihoods” depend on the decisions that executives make in a boardroom, and that means “safety and quality and work product can never be a second thought.”

Ward’s path to leadership at Pinnacle began with rough-necking offshore for Nabors Industries Ltd. and eventually high-responsibility roles with Kinder Morgan Inc.

He said that “all of us at Pinnacle II have worked in the field at some point … I worked on offshore rigs every summer in college and as a field level pumper during the school year, and these experiences help me relate to the complexities of what’s going on in a deal all the way from the field level to the boardroom.”