After decades of building gas processing systems, Clark Dickson, president of Dickson Process Systems, is being recognized by his alma mater.
The University of New Mexico, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, is honoring him with a 2023 Distinguished Alumni Award Nov. 17 at Sandia Resort and Casino in Albuquerque.
“I’m just proud of being recognized by my school. You’ve got to be nominated, and unbeknownst to me, I had a high school classmate — he was a senior and I was a junior — and we were taking a math class together. He got a mechanical engineering degree at UNM and he went to work for Exxon and worked for them his entire career. He nominated me. How he found out I was an engineer I don’t know. But he nominated me probably three years ago. The first year, I did not receive it and I guess they just kept putting my name in,” Dickson said.
He added that he was notified earlier this year that he won the award. Graduates from each discipline are recognized.
“I’m just proud of my accomplishments,” Dickson said.
His friend Phil Fouche has much praise for Dickson.
“Clark Dickson is one of the nicest, smartest people I know, and extremely quiet, but when he talks, everyone listens and they usually laugh; a great sense of humor. He has done a lot for West Texas with his fabrication business. (This is) a well-deserved honor as distinguished alumni of UNM,” Fouche said.
Dickson’s company designs equipment to take the water out of natural gas. Overall, he has about 40-45 employees currently. They have had as many as 90, but the firm took a hit during COVID.
“It also sometimes has carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide in it, so we build plants to remove those impurities. Here recently we’re building LNG pretreatment facilities, which is the same thing. People use pipeline gas and pipeline gas is allowed 2 percent CO2 in the gas. When you liquefy it into LNG, you’ve got to take it down to 50 parts per million. So we’ll put them in a main unit to do that, and then it has to be very dry like one ppm of water so we use Mol Sieve dehydration to remove the water. Here lately we’ve built quite a few of those all over the country,” Dickson said.
Their pretreatment systems are no longer in Odessa.
“We’ve got some equipment over it in Orla where all that activity is. We’ve got equipment in Goldsmith,” Dickson said. “We’ve shipped all over the world, too, but most of it is domestic. We’re getting ready to start up a LNG facility in the Boston area.”
A native of Wichita, Kansas, his family moved to Albuquerque for Dickson’s asthma when he was 5. Albuquerque was where he went to high school and college.
”I was working with El Paso products … in 1974. In about ‘79 or ‘80, my future partner (Tom Trier) and I got loaned out to Odessa Natural Corporation. They were building an expander plant near Eastland. The company that was doing it was T.H. Russell. … We were driving back and forth to Eastland. … It takes three or four hours to get over there and when we were talking we said, you know, we can do this. So in March of ‘81, we started our company. We wanted to just do engineering. But at that time, all these major oil companies did their own engineering, in-house. So we decided we better start building equipment,” Dickson said.
They rented a shop on the west side of Odessa, hired some welders and started building their own equipment. Eventually, they bought the Skytop Brewster building and they have added on to it over the years. The company was originally called Dickson and Trier Engineering.
Through the years, they have also joined and split up with different companies. Dickson said he bought out Trier in 2007.
He and his wife, Anne, have two sons who both work in the company with him, and four grandchildren.
Both of his sons went to University of New Mexico. The oldest went to Baylor University and got a philosophy degree. He ultimately took a career test that showed he was suited to be a civil engineer.
“So he went back and got a civil engineering degree from UNM. My youngest son got a business degree from UNM. I suggested that if he was going to work here, he got to have a engineering degree and he went back and got a mechanical engineering degree from UTPB,” Dickson said.
He added that UTPB has been a good resource for this area. Dickson said he is on the engineering advisory board.
