Interviewer : Tyler Priest

Affiliation: University of Houston

Phil Wilbourn studied at Tennessee Tech University on a baseball scholarship, and graduated in 1966 with an engineering degree in hand. In 1967, Wilbur signed on with Texaco, and worked for two years focused on shallow-water platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. Wilbur worked for Texaco across the Gulf Coast and in Saudi Arabia. He worked on the design phase for the LOOP port off of Louisiana as well. Wheeler worked with Curtis Burton and Steve Wheeler in investigating the future of technology in deepwater; after Texaco management declined to fund a program up to perhaps $70 million, Wilbourn 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.