Interviewer : Tyler Priest

Affiliation: University of Houston

Steven Wheeler hailed from Montana, from which he followed his father’s career into the oil industry and eventually to Houston. Wheeler earned a degree in mechanical engineering from Texas A&M, and promptly joined Texaco in 1975. He spent twelve years with Texaco in the North Sea, where he was introduced to subsea production technology, and worked especially on several record-setting subsea tie-back systems. In 1988 Wheeler returned to the Gulf of Mexico, and helped form a team that projected Texaco’s potential future in expanding into deepwater. After management declined to fund a program up to perhaps $70 million, Wheeler and others at Texaco used a smaller amount of money to begin setting up a joint industry research group, known as DeepStar. The DeepStar group is widely recognized as helping to advance deepwater and subsea technology rapidly in the early 1990s, and thus contributing to the deepwater boom that followed.