The discovery of oil holds mystique for many people and calls up images of the grizzled wildcatter going with gut feeling, but, in reality, it comes down to hardcore analysis and experience. Is there oil in that pocket? It’s rarely known with certitude, but geologist Byron Dyer ’57 has been right more often than not, often enough to be successful on land and offshore. Since the 1960s, Dyer has used his analytical skills to find pockets of the precious resource, eventually building a company that would become a major producer along the Gulf Coast.
For the last 15 years of his career, Dyer was president and CEO of Norcen Explorer Inc., the U.S. arm of Norcen Energy Ltd., a Canadian corporation. “I guess I was the one who could add and subtract,” he jokes. His success proved his abilities to be a bit more advanced. The development of those skills began as a geology student at Lamar. After two years of Army service in Virginia and Germany beginning in 1953, Dyer took advantage of the GI bill to finish college. After visiting a few universities, he chose Lamar, affordable, convenient to his hometown of Mont Belvieu and accommodating to the college hours he already possessed.
“I visited at Lamar, and Ed Eveland was head of the department there then. I chatted with Saul Aronow, Bill Matthews and a few other people, and they were helpful, rather than condescending. They were willing to let me take a couple of geology courses concurrently, and that let me graduate in two years,” Dyer said. Geology was his choice because he had grown up working in the summers in the oil field. “I liked the people, the engineers and geologists I met, and the kind of work they did. I was dead set on being a subsurface geologist who could find oil and gas. That just seemed to be the fun part of it,” he said.
Upon graduation, he applied with about 15 companies and earned a position as a junior geologist with Tidewater Oil Co., which later became Getty Oil Co. “The guy called me about 11:30 p.m. on Saturday night and said, ‘I’ve got a job for you if you can be in Corpus Christi Monday morning at 9 ‘o clock,’” Dyer recalls. He liberated his ’52 Chevrolet, earned with Army pay, from the parking lot across from where he had lived in West Hall on campus. “The chemical releases just rusted that paint. I really looked like somethin’ goin’ down the road. The first thing I did when I got that job in Corpus Christi was to take my car and have it fixed.” He’s grateful for the time at Tidewater. “It was nice time, a good learning time, and I got with a guy who was about 45 and had been working twenty-something years. There was a lot he taught me.” After three years, he took a pay raise with a company car and moved on to Texas Eastern. He had met his wife, Connie, in Corpus Christi in Sunday School. This year, the couple has been married 47 years. They have two sons and a daughter.
His experience in Corpus earned him a position with Fort Worth’s Southland Royalty Co., representing them on the Gulf Coast, but he soon decided opportunities would be better in Houston. He became division manager for the entire Gulf Coast for Mesa Petroleum Co., spending three years there before taking the plunge and going to work for himself, developing prospects, buying acreage and packaging them for sale while keeping a interest in them.
One of his backers was Norcen. “They walked in one day, and I thought, ‘Ohhh. They’re not very satisfied.’ The first thing they said was, ‘We want to buy your company.’ And I said, “I really don’t want to sell it.” And they said, “We kind of thought that, but we want to buy your company and we want to buy you. We want you to run our business on the Gulf Coast.” He took their offer and became president of Norcen Explorer Inc., which ranked as one of the top producers of both oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico, Venezuela and Argentina.
He loves the work. “I liked the challenge—that here’s a piece of paper and here are these electric logs [geophysical measurements]. I used to sit down and work through those logs and create something on that piece of paper. I though it was just absolutely fascinating. I wouldn’t have been a brain surgeon if someone had said, ‘You can trade.’ It was a wonderful time, and I enjoyed every minute of my professional career,” Dyer said. “It’s very gratifying—to start a project from nothing and bring it all the way to producing and making money. A lot of people don’t have that kind of opportunity in their endeavors.”
Certain features about a geological prospect make it good, mediocre or bad. As time has passed, pulling the oil from the ground has become more and more expensive. “You have to know the type of play you’re looking for and how to approach it to determine if it’s large enough to have an impact on your company. You can’t act on a hunch,” Dyer said. “You have to have the data, meaning seismic and subsurface data that tells you there’s a really good possibility that there’s a structure there that can hold oil and gas, and, then, if you’re in the right trend and in the right area, you’ll be successful if you really apply your geological skills and have a good methodology to evaluate data.
“I was surprised a lot,” he said with a chuckle. “You can’t see in the subsurface. That’s a big equalizer. It kind of humbles you every now and then. I’ve drilled wells that I just thought were the best in the world—that you just couldn’t get a better prospect, and it was a dry hole. And I’ve drilled things that just jumped up and made wonderful discoveries. It was really fun. I enjoyed it and just couldn’t wait to get up and work in the morning. I knew people that didn’t feel that way, and I just really felt blessed that ol’ Ed and Bill and Saul cracked their whip.”
At the time of Dyer’s retirement in 1998, which coincided with the sale of the company, he had over 50 producing structures in the Gulf of Mexico, ranging from one-well canisters to platforms, as well as fields in Argentina and Guatemala. “We took a little company, basically a two-person company, and turned it into one that was operating over 50 structures offshore and several good-sized fields onshore. I was really proud of that,” he said.
Does he miss it? “Yea, I really do, but there’s time that you need to back away from things,” he said. For Dyer, though, backing away just leads him in another direction. Today, Dyer keeps his hand in. He still invests in “a few little things. We’re completing a gas well in Mississippi right now that I have a small interest in. I have a little production that I monitor.” He and Connie are longtime supporters and members of the Houston Museum of Natural Science. They see it as an asset to Houston and a catalyst for children’s dreams. “It’s a great teaching model,” he said. “They see things that they would never see anywhere else. Things like that spur children’s imaginations and start ’em thinking.” He also gives back to his alma mater as a member of the geology department’s advisory committee. “There’s enough for everybody on it to do,” he said. His relationship with HMNS has enabled a partnership with Lamar to gain a truly exceptional mineral exhibit to be displayed in the Geology Building. They’ve picked out the best pieces, the best minerals, and now we’ll have them on display. Our guys at Lamar—Jim Jordan and Joe Kruger—have put together a pretty good department.”
