Everette Lee DeGolyer (October 9, 1886 – December 14, 1956), was a prominent oil company executive, petroleum exploration geophysicist and philanthropist in Dallas.

[4][5] Around eight months after beginning his work at Mexican Eagle Oil, DeGolyer married Nell Virginia Goodrich, then a teaching assistant and graduate of the University of Oklahoma, at 8:00 am on the morning of June 10, 1910, at her home in Norman, Oklahoma, then returned with her to live briefly first in Tuxpan and later in Tampico, Mexico, around 30 miles North of his strike at Potrero del Llano.

After his strike at Potrero, with strong support and encouragement from his wife Nell, who had formerly completed degrees there in Music and Philosophy, DeGolyer took a leave of absence to return to the University of Oklahoma to finish his A.B.

[9] He moved to Montclair, New Jersey, to work in New York City in 1916 as an independent consultant, but primarily still functioning as a manager for Mexican Eagle Oil.

[11] As a geophysical consultant with the Rycade Corporation, he made the first torsion balance survey in the United States at the highly productive Spindletop oilfield, near Beaumont in South Texas.

The strike, on the flank of a salt dome in Texas's Southern Fort Bend, occurred on January 3, 1926, using the torsion balance method which utilized gravity to identify and map layers of underground rock strata, while roughly approximating their size, depth, and density.

[13] In 1920, DeGolyer organized the formation of the Amerada Petroleum Corporation (1920) for Lord Cowdray, rising to become general manager, president, and chairman from 1929 to 1932.

Karcher, who already held patents in reflection seismography, would hire electrical engineer and physicist Eugene McDermott, and a staff of geophysicists who would use and continue to develop the seismograph to discover oil deposits.

The Seismographic refraction method attempted to plot and identify the composition of underground rock strata primarily by measuring the speed with which sound waves passed through them.

[1] In 1930, while working for Amerada, but already active in the formation of Geophysical Service Inc., using the new reflection seismology method he diagnosed a well location in Oklahoma's Seminole Plateau, then known as Edwards Field, which drilled at a depth of 4,216 feet, would initially produce 8000 barrels a day.

DeGolyer provided financial support for the 1930 establishment of GRC's successor, Geophysical Service Incorporated (GSI) which would make more extensive use of the superior reflection seismology method of detection.

DeGolyer would acquire 50% interest in GSI, which he would purchase for $100,000, though as he had yet to leave the board of Geophysical Research Corporation and Amerada, he did not initially fully divulge his involvement and his part ownership was held in co-founder J.C. Karcher's name.

In January 1937, based on data from seismographic reflection, DeGolyer drilled a well near Patoka, Illinois which immediately produced 1,500 barrels a day.

Felmont, in which he co-invested with banker and New Jersey neighbor Walter Case "never succeeded in finding the elephant oilfields that DeGolyer hoped", and he let the company go in 1939.

"[22] During this period, DeGolyer backed a proposal by PRC officer Harold L. Ickes that advocated spending $120 million of Federal funds to build a pipeline to send Kuwaiti and Saudi oil to the Mediterranean Sea for shipment.

[1] DeGolyer served on numerous boards of directors, including the Texas Eastern Gas Transmission Corporation, Dresser Industries and the Southern Pacific Railroad.

[19] The DeGolyers lived at Rancho Encinal, a Spanish Colonial Revival home in Dallas, elegantly furnished with an extensive library and museum quality furniture and art.

The literary collections he donated included early editions of books by English authors Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Bernard Shaw, Lewis Carroll, and American writers Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Booth Tarkington, and Christopher Morley.

Surgery to reattach the retina was unsuccessful, though his retinal problems could have been the result of anemic retinopathy, not uncommon in untreated sufferers of aplastic anemia with consistently low hemoglobin counts.

[37][38] After suffering with diminishing vision, memory problems and the painful blood disease for close to seven years, Everette DeGolyer took his own life in his office in Dallas on December 14, 1956.