Interviewer: Tyler Priest

Affiliation: University of Houston

Robert J. Brown found his first job in the petroleum industry in 1950, working as the tail chainman on a Tennessee Gas pipeline survey crew. His tenure with Tenneco took him between sites in New England and Texas, and then on to the Muskrat Pipeline in the marshes of Louisiana. By 1969, Brown left to serve as chief engineer for the Collins Construction Company, and in that position he took on work as far afield as Venezuela and the Persian Gulf. Brown earned a master’s degree in civil engineering at Stanford University in 1962, and seven years later he and two partners formed R.J. Brown and Associates. There, Brown oversaw work on designing and fabricating lay-barges; pipeline towing operations in the North Sea and elsewhere; and innovative work in the Canadian Arctic in the mid-1970s. As of the interview date, Brown’s company, a subsidiary of Technip, was named R.J. Brown Deepwater.