Despite his modesty, Decker Dawson has reason to be proud of his company's unparalleled success. E&P visited with Dawson recently to talk about Dawson Geophysical, Midland, Texas, in the 1950s, and the life and times of a geophysical contractor.

It's classic Decker Dawson style. At the end of an interview that was all about him and his experiences, he told this reporter that Steve Jumper, president of Dawson Geophysical, was really the person I ought to be talking to. It's almost impossible to get this man to brag about himself or take any credit whatsoever for the ongoing success of his company in one of the most cutthroat and difficult segments of the oil and gas industry. It's been a fine group of employees and a loyal contingent of clients that has made the company what it is, he contends. Dawson, one supposes, must just have been along for the ride.
In truth, his modesty belies a lifetime of dedicated and honest hard work, sticking to his principles and not fixing what ain't broken. Dawson began his career working for a company that's now part of Exxon, then spent 4 years in the US Navy during World War II. Upon leaving the Navy, he joined a brand-new company called Republic Exploration Co. as a "computer," not of the Univac variety but as an employee performing computations.
On Jan. 1, 1947, he was transferred to Midland. "I wondered what I'd done wrong," he admitted upon seeing the less-than-scenic countryside. But the place grew on him. "I just fell in love with this country," he said. "It's a great place to live and work. It's also probably one of the most productive basins in the world."
He added that the region's long oil history made it kind of a "trade secret." "It's so efficient to operate here," he said. "If anything breaks, we can get it fixed very quickly."
By 1952 Dawson was enamored with Midland but not so much with Republic, so he formed his own company, Dawson Geophysical. He started the company by launching one crew with 24 channels (modern crews, by comparison, have upwards of 9,000 channels). The typical crew in the '50s had 12 to 15 people; modern crews are closer to 60.
The Permian Basin was enjoying one of its many rebirths at the time. "In the early days this was primarily a drilling boom because of the relatively shallow production in the Permian rocks," he recalled. "It didn't require a lot of geophysics - just about every place somebody stuck a hole in the ground, they found oil."
By the 1950s, however, companies were looking deeper for their prospects, and geophysics began to come into play. Dawson estimated that geophysics has probably been responsible for the majority of the pre-Permian discoveries.
As a result, Midland was crawling with geophysical contractors at the time. Dawson said there were probably more than 20 companies either headquartered there or with offices there, and there were probably 150 crews in the basin.
But bust followed boom. Midland has been hit particularly hard by more recent busts and is also a victim of the centralization and consolidation that has characterized the oil industry in more recent years. "We still have a lot of companies here with offices, but the major companies at one time had large offices here, with hundreds of employees," he said. "That's why all of these offices got built. About half of them are empty now."
But Dawson Geophysical is still there. And it's huge. From one crew in 1952 the company grew fairly steadily. But it had a few significant surges along the way due to Dawson's willingness to embrace new technology. In the 1950s the main advances were the development of magnetic recording and electronic data processing (Dawson said processing centers were then referred to as "playback centers") and the invention of the Vibroseis energy source, which offered an alternative to dynamite in certain terrain. The 1960s saw the transition from analog to digital recording.
"The digital revolution really caused our business to become capital-intensive," Dawson said. "It never really was before. Our company started with less than US $50,000 to put a crew out, and today it costs maybe $15 million. This has been an evolutionary process, but along the road we had to become a public company to raise capital because the cost of our tools was getting too expensive for us to afford out of our earnings."
The company went public in 1981 and has had three public offerings since then.
The next major revolution was the advent of 3-D seismic in the 1980s and '90s. "Three-D really transformed the way we do business," Dawson said. "We got in on the forefront of it and were able to help some of our clients find additional oil pretty early on. That helped our reputation a good bit."
The most recent technological advance has been in multicomponent seismic. Dawson is less certain that this technology will ever see widespread acceptance. "We probably have done as much multicomponent as anybody, but that isn't very much," he said. "It really has not excited anybody onshore. We're capable of doing it, but there just hasn't been much demand."
The primary issue is the cost. A true multicomponent survey, which measures shear as well as compressional waves and incorporates shear sources as well as receivers, results in nine times as much data as a conventional 3-D survey. "There's just no inexpensive way of doing that," Dawson said. "I guess what has to happen is that somebody makes a major discovery in a place that the normal 3-D exploration has missed. If they find something everyone else has missed and it gets a lot of publicity, then we'll be off to the races."
The final aspect of Dawson's growth has been market-driven rather than technology-driven. A couple of years ago WesternGeco, the world's largest geophysical contractor, decided to close down its Lower 48 land crews, leaving a wealth of work as well as a wealth of experienced, unemployed personnel. Dawson was quick to pick up the slack in both cases.
"We've virtually doubled the size of our company in a 2-year period," he said. The company now runs 11 crews and has added many in a relatively short period of time. He said the secret to expanding this way is to train people from the ground up so that when a new crew is formed, well-trained employees from existing crews can be moved into the managerial positions, filling the vacancies with less-experienced hands.
For Dawson, the better expansion is the technology that is continually updated on the crews. "Not only are we expanding the number of crews, but we're expanding the capabilities of each and every crew, adding data channels and energy source units. We call that a vertical expansion, whereas adding crews is more of a horizontal expansion.
"The investment community likes to see us expand horizontally, but we think it's more profitable to expand vertically, to make sure we're at least state-of-the-art if not ahead of it."
Business sense
It seems that the combination of good old-fashioned values and up-to-date technological expertise has paid dividends for this company. One wonders what it must have been like for Dawson, who grew up in the oil patch and had spent his life as a geophysicist, to meet with Wall Street analysts and investment bankers.
"I was a geophysicist," he said. "But somewhere along the road I guess I stopped being a geophysicist and had to be some kind of a businessman. I had absolutely no business training whatsoever. So it's hard for me to claim any ability."
But certain decisions made early on seem to have paid off. Dawson only operates in the Lower 48 land market. In fact, one gets the sense that Midland's insulation from the ocean is part of the charm for him. Even the swampy areas of the Gulf Coast are more or less off-limits for Dawson crews.
"We're not swamp folks," he said. "We're pretty much a dry land company. The swamps and the transition zone along the coast is a very specialized effort, and it's out of our league. We've very comfortable on land. Nothing in Canada or overseas. Nothing on the water. I get seasick."
With current high commodity prices, Dawson sees plenty of work left in his chosen playground. "The seismograph doesn't move very fast," he said. "We can't survey the whole state of Texas in 3 days. We do it one square mile at a time.
And we haven't begun to explore all of the potential oil and gas areas of this country."
The constant improvements in seismic technology are helpful here, he added, because nearly every place they're shooting now has been shot at least once before. "But we're doing a better, more thorough, more precise job," he said. "And 10 years from now we'll be so much better than we are now that we'll be back again, looking for what we missed the last time."
Client collaboration is another one of the company's strong points. Dawson is not afraid to tell his investors that the company's focus is to help clients find oil and gas. "If in the process of helping clients find oil and gas we become profitable, well, that's fine," he said.
And how is it that Dawson Geophysical has not been bought by or merged with another company in an industry in which company names today bear almost no resemblance to those of even 20 years ago? "Nobody wants us," he smiled. More to the point is his dogged determination to keep the company independent, to keep the culture relaxed and creative, and to treat his employees and customers with respect. "We have a way of doing things that suits us; we're stuck in our ways, maybe," he said. "We just feel we have an obligation - we have 800 employees, and I don't want to see us taken over by a great big company. If our shareholders vote to do it, we're gone, but I'm going to be the one pounding the table saying, 'Hey, we're better off in the long term keeping this organization together and letting it grow and do its thing.'
"We've got a 53-year history of doing our own thing, so leave us alone."

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