GPA Midstream Chair Micheal Dunn is retiring May 2 from his position as Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of The Williams Companies. He will be replaced as Chair by Greg Floerke, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at MPLX. Bill Johnson, Vice President of Midstream Operations at Phillips 66, will become Chair-Elect.

Floerke will serve the remainder of Dunn’s two-year term, which ends at the 2025 GPA Midstream Convention in September.

Dunn, who earned a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Oklahoma, finishes a 37-year career in the midstream industry. Career highlights include serving as Executive Vice President and COO of Williams, President of Questar Pipeline and Executive Vice President of Questar Corporation, President and CEO of PacifiCorp Energy, a multi-state power generating company and subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway Energy, President of Kern River Gas Transmission Company, also a Berkshire Hathaway Energy subsidiary.

In his current role at Williams, which he began in 2017, Dunn focused on achieving regulatory compliance, optimizing operations and executing the company’s long-term strategy. Throughout his career, he prioritized his team’s safety.

“We’ve moved the needle here at Williams in improving our safety performance — recognizing hazards and eliminating them from the workplace,” Dunn said. “We’ve worked hard to improve the safety stature of the whole industry through our contractors and working with unions, making sure we’re all working together to improve safety.”

Under his leadership, Williams launched a mental health awareness program to promote the overall health and wellbeing of employees.

“Mental health is an area we don’t talk about enough as companies,” Dunn said. “It’s a fact that everybody has struggles, and everybody’s dealing with something in their lives. We need to talk more about it, check in with each other and get rid of the stigma associated with mental health struggles.”

While Dunn’s been part of an array of midstream infrastructure projects throughout his career, he said his work on the Kern River Pipeline project had the biggest personal and professional impact.

“I was just a couple years out of college, and it was a great opportunity to head out to west to Utah, a part of the country I’d never been to before,” Dunn said. “I was going to spend a year out there, help build that project and then come back to Oklahoma. I liked it out there so much, I ended up staying half my life in Wyoming and Utah after that project concluded. I got to come back eight years ago and finish up my career here at Williams, where it all started.”

A significant focus of his professional life has been working to develop the careers of the people around him.

“I spent most of my career in operations, engineering, and project management roles before I got into senior leadership, and I really tried to help train the future leaders of the industry,” Dunn said. “When you’ve been in the industry 37 years, you run across a lot of people. I’ve always been direct with people about setting high expectations for individual, team and company performance. Hopefully that’s something I’ve left with people and will continue on here at Williams.”

Dunn began volunteering with GPA Midstream five years ago when he took over a board seat held by a Williams executive who left the company.

“I wish I would have been involved sooner,” he said. “It’s a great organization. It provides a lot of opportunity for people to learn about the midstream industry, as well as leadership opportunities for our employees as committee chairs or vice chairs or as committee members.

“I don’t think people recognize the importance of those opportunities for their careers, for the networking opportunities,” Dunn continued. “Getting to know people outside your own business area is incredibly important. You never know when you might need that relationship — whether it be commercially or in a project or in operations. It’s a pretty small industry, and GPA facilitates these relationships.”

Dunn said GPA Midstream’s role in setting and maintaining the technical standards is vital to the global oil and gas industry.

“GPA Midstream is one of the only entities out there that can set standards for the industry,” Dunn said. “The organization has a long legacy of managing those standards for our industry, and I don’t see that changing. People look to GPA as the go-to for expertise when it comes to standards for gathering and processing in our industry.

“We need a lot of volunteer participation from our member companies,” Dunn continued. “As executives in this industry, we need to encourage our employees to participate — to get on the committees and drive the changes and improvements we continue to seek for our industry.”

In retirement, Dunn forecasts several trips to Las Vegas as he nurtures a budding poker career.

“I’ve actually won a World Series of Poker ring, so I’m no slouch,” Dunn said. “But I don’t play very much.”

As he comes to the end of nearly four decades in the industry, Dunn says he hopes to see a greater understanding of the industry’s value and importance.

“What we do is incredibly important to making people’s lives better,” he said. “I hope we continue to find ways to build our reputation as an industry and continue to improve our emissions and our environmental footprint because that’s the price of us being in this industry. I encourage everyone working in the industry to find ways to make it better as we go forward.”