Foundation Spotlight
Chad Deaton – CEO, Mentor, and Visionary

Growing up in the tiny northern Wyoming town of Byron, Chad Deaton always knew he wanted to work in the oil patch.
His father and both his grandfathers worked in or invested in the oil industry. In fact, his father’s father worked on the first oil well drilled in the Big Horn Basin. Chad’s youngest daughter, too, earned a degree in chemical engineering and worked for Chevron, tallying four generations of Deatons who have worked in the oil industry.
“I just had a lot of oily blood, I guess,” he says.
Deaton’s journey into the oil industry can be traced to the day his father took him to see Dowell, a division of Dow Chemical, use remote operations to frac a well. A junior in high school, Deaton was fascinated and decided, then and there, that he wanted to go into engineering or geology. He later attended the University of Wyoming, though petroleum geology was not offered at the time. He chose general geology for a major.
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