Devon promises OU its biggest corporate gift ever

By James S. Tyree

Transcript Staff Writer

An Oklahoma City-based oil and gas drilling company will dig deep and give the University of Oklahoma its biggest corporate gift ever.

Devon Energy Corp will donate $10 million for a teaching and research facility to be built at the corner of Boyd Street and Jenkins Avenue. Company and university officials announced the gift on Nov. 8 outside the Carson Engineering building, next to where the 80,000-square-foot, $27 million Devon Energy Hall will be built.

No timetable for the construction start or finish was announced.

“This new facility will allow us to increase our faculty size and our (College of Engineering) graduate student enrollment by 40 percent as well as increase the number of undergraduates in major engineering disciplines,” said OU president David Boren. “Without Devon’s support for this additional new space, we could not achieve this strategic growth.”

The building will have team rooms on each floor along with laboratories, classrooms and mobile workstations. A 2,200-square-foot, four-story atrium will be its main architectural feature.

Boren said Devon Energy Hall “will be the cornerstone of the new Engineering Quadrangle” to include the Carson Engineering Building, Sarkeys Energy Center, Felgar Hall and a future Engineering Practice Facility just south of the Devon building.

The practice facility will be where students can conduct experiments and work on long-range projects like the Sooner Lunar Schooner, a craft graduate student Michael Hollinger said someday will ride on the moon’s surface and plant an OU flag there.

“On behalf of students and the College of Engineering, we thank all the great benefactors,” Hollinger said. “We hope to make you proud.”

College of Engineering dean Skip Porter said the Devon Energy Building and the entire quadrangle makes a strong statement on the college’s commitment to research and development, “not just for the state, but across the nation.” The college has about 130 faculty members, 2,300 undergraduate students and 700 graduate students.

Devon CEO Larry Nichols said the donation is just as much an investment for his company as it is for the university and the state. The idea developed through conversations he had with Boren.

“We were looking for ways to help the University of Oklahoma, and there’s our need to hire the people we need to grow a company,” Nichols said.

Devon Energy was founded in 1971 by Nichols and his father, John.

The company produces more than 700,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day and reserves more than 2 billion barrels of oil equivalent worldwide.

The Nichols family and Devon have made previous contributions to OU’s College of Engineering, Price College of Business, School of Geology and Geophysics, School of Dance, OU Libraries and the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History.