An Exemplary Life

In his almost nine decades of life, Charles Richard “Dick” Sivalls has worked for one company: the one currently known as Sivalls, Incorporated. His achievements, however, span a wide area of public service, charitable work, writing/publishing, professional associations, and family life. All of that reveals his strong dedication to making life better for everyone around him.

It is this spirit of service, public and professional, for which the Permian Basin Petroleum Association has named Sivalls its Top Hand for 2023. He will be feted Jan. 18 at PBPA’s Top Hand Banquet, an event held annually in Midland’s Petroleum Club. Being named Top Hand means that the honoree is an energy professional who exemplifies all of the best qualities of professional and community service.

Sivalls is president and chief executive officer of Sivalls Inc, which manufactures and sells process equipment for the oil, gas, and petrochemical industries. He is also president of Tectrol, Inc., and Control Ventures, Inc.

This was the second significant award for Sivalls in 2023. He was also the Honoree for the 2023 Permian Basin International Oil Show (PBIOS). D. Kirk Edwards, president and CEO of Latigo Petroleum and past president/ longtime member of the PBIOS board of directors, noted that he had known Sivalls “all my adult life.” He lauded Sivalls for “his reputation as being a well-educated, honest, and hard-working person that cared deeply about Odessa and the Permian Basin Community.” Edwards noted that Sivalls’ children and grandchildren have also grown up to be involved in the community.

Edwards added, “I admire Dick for being humble in his ways when so many accolades and business successes have come his way. He has been very deserving of them.” Sivalls clearly has been a role model not just for Edwards but for many others.

 

Public Service

This is a very abbreviated list of his service, starting with civic work: Odessa City Council, Odessa Mayor Pro Tem, Permian Basin Regional Planning Commission (all of which are elected offices), Odessa Industrial Development Corporation, the Permian Basin Workforce Development Board, and the Odessa Development Corporation.

He is also active in a number of professional associations. A Licensed Professional Engineer (PE), he is a Fellow Member of the National Society of Professional Engineers (F.NSPE), the Texas Society of Professional Engineers, having held a number of elected and appointed positions there, and other organizations. He has been chairman of both the PBPA and PBIOS boards.

Sivalls’ commitment to public service began with advice from an early mentor at the company, who told him, “Learn to help the community and it will help you.” Not only did Sivalls himself follow that advice, he’s spent his life encouraging people in the oil and gas industry as a whole to follow suit.

He also points out that he’s not joining just to pad a resume, or to accumulate pats on the back. He won’t abandon a cause after he steps down from leadership. “If I like the organization, I keep going.”

 

The Only Thing He Wanted to Do

Born in 1934, Sivalls was about 13 years old when his father founded Sivalls Tanks in Odessa in 1947. The family lived in Oklahoma City, which had been home to Black, Sivalls, and Bryson, an oilfield service company that his father and partners dissolved the previous year so that all three could open new businesses in the suddenly booming Permian Basin.

The younger Sivalls was sent to Odessa every summer in high school and college to work in the family business. Starting from the bottom—shoveling dirt and manually leveling ground for setting up new tanks—he learned the business literally from the ground up.

When asked if he’d ever considered doing anything else, he pointed out that those summers in the family business constituted his first job experience and that, following a two-year Army stint after college graduation, he returned to the firm to make use of his structural engineering degree. In other words, it’s the only company he’s ever worked for.

In his younger years he played in the previous company’s Oklahoma City yard on Saturdays and through the summers. “I knew tanks and stuff when I saw them. I learned them from the ground up,” he laughed.

Dick Sivalls was already the third generation of tank builders. His grandfather, a cooper (barrel builder) built wooden oil tanks in Oklahoma in the early 1900s.

 

An Early Mentor

Maybe engineers are thought of as being in a different category from “creative” people, but the young Sivalls quickly learned that engineering is really just a different kind of creativity. He recalls learning much about that from the late Charles Perry, who worked for the company for about 11 years before launching his own distinguished oil and gas career.

Sivalls credits Perry, a chemical engineer, with helping develop “a lot of the products that we subsequently learned how to build and sell,” including treating systems for high pressure gas wells. Previously the company had treated only low-pressure oil production, separating the oil, water, and gas.

 

Keeping up with the Times/Tanks for the Memory

Perry, he said, helped them see potential in additional services, a vision that led them in the 1980s to stop building tanks and lean into the treating business more fully. Seeing that tank making was low profit and that they could simply order perfectly good tanks from elsewhere, they changed focus and renamed the company to Sivalls, Inc., in 1977. They stopped building tanks altogether around 1982.

After more than 60 years in the business, Sivalls is still in today’s marketplace, well versed on the electronics of tank monitoring, vapor recovery, and remote control—because the company has continued to evolve. They help producers stay ahead of new methane regulations and requirements with the new technology and controls.

The company’s footprint extends past the Permian Basin and Oklahoma to elsewhere in Texas, along with North Dakota, Wyoming, and Utah.

 

Words to the Future

Sivalls says that, while there are several engineering specialties, he still sees his own—mechanical engineering—as the most versatile. He sees it overlap with chemical, structural, and electrical engineering, “a broad base of engineering that can fit our type of business.”

Believing that modern-day engineering majors of 120 credit hours are not enough to cover the information needed in the real world—he says his 1959 degree required 144 hours—Sivalls has taught “real world” classes at Texas Tech over the years. Among his most cherished contributions there is a manual on “how various pieces of [our] equipment work, and how they’re designed and built,” he said. “I get compliments from retiring engineers that they still have our books that they got at Texas Tech,” which would have to be 40 or more years ago.

He added, “If we were to hire an engineer today, with a graduate degree, it would take a year to train him to be efficient for us. There’s that much to learn on the job that you don’t get in school.”

 

The Family

Much like his own story of growing up in the family business, his two adult children, daughter Stephanie Sivalls Latimer (VP of administration), and son Tracy, are also associated there. Tracy is vice president of Control Ventures, formerly Control Equipment, Inc. Control Ventures was a distributor for Kim-Ray valves and controls, a situation that changed in 2021 when Kim-Ray bought back the distributorship. Now Control Ventures manages Sivalls’ real estate holdings, still closely associated with the parent company.

Of the three grandchildren, only Reagan Latimer Lammons worked for the company, as a personal assistant during summers and holidays from 2011-2018.

Sivalls was married to the late Lura Jo, the mother of both Stephanie and Tracy.

 

The Legacy

It would be difficult to overestimate the number of lives enriched by Dick Sivalls and his family. A man whose name is known in business and civic circles for his service and his humility, Sivalls has lived a life well worth honoring.