Buckeye Partners has appointed Donald Sinclair as chairman of its board of directors. The company, which operates liquid petroleum products pipelines and terminals in the United States, announced the appointment on 28 August 2026 and pointed to Sinclair's record of more than 40 years in the American midstream energy sector. The announcement did not name an outgoing chairman and did not give an effective date for the change.
Sinclair takes the chairmanship while holding a number of other positions. He sits on the boards of Ascent Resources and HighPoint Midstream. In March 2025 he was appointed to the Board of Regents of the Texas Tech University System, a term that runs until 31 January 2031, and he serves as vice chairman on the executive committee of the UT MD Anderson Cancer Center Board of Visitors. The chairmanship is therefore one of several concurrent commitments rather than an executive appointment.
His operating career has been spent in United States energy. He was president and chief executive officer of Western Gas Partners from 2009 to 2017 and served as a senior vice president of Anadarko Petroleum. Earlier he was president of Duke Energy Trading and Marketing and senior vice president and chief risk officer of Dynegy. He co-founded Ceritas Energy and was its president from 2003 to 2009. He holds a BBA in management awarded by Texas Tech in 1980 and is a Distinguished Alumnus of the Rawls College of Business. Taken together, his roles span midstream operations, trading and marketing, and risk management.
Buckeye Partners operates more than 5,000 miles of domestic pipeline, more than 130 liquid petroleum products terminals and about 125 million barrels of tank capacity. The company is a wholly owned investment of the IFM Global Infrastructure Fund, so it answers to a single institutional owner rather than to public equity markets.
The choice puts a former midstream chief executive at the head of the board of a midstream business. Sinclair ran Western Gas Partners, a midstream partnership, for eight years, and his earlier roles at Duke Energy Trading and Marketing and Dynegy were in trading, marketing and risk, which suggests the board was seeking commercial and risk experience alongside pipeline operating knowledge rather than a purely financial or governance profile. The ownership structure shapes the job: on the scale set out in the announcement, more than 5,000 miles of pipeline and about 125 million barrels of tank capacity, the chairman of a fund owned company oversees a long lived physical asset base for one shareholder, without the quarterly reporting cycle a listed operator carries. His concurrent directorships and the Texas Tech regency that runs to 2031 indicate a non-executive portfolio rather than day to day involvement in the business.
