Our Leadership Team

Don Taylor

Operations Manager

Don Taylor’s oil industry roots run deep. His father was in oil field sales, which meant Don lived in five different cities and three states before he graduated from high school. Eventually, he landed in Texas City at the Amoco Chemicals plant, where he worked as an operator.

While he loved working for the company, Don found that unit-specific operator training was lacking. This motivated him to action and within six years he was training a group of incoming operators. In the process of training others, Don was forced into a higher level of expertise and therefore received the best training he had ever experienced.

Having worked closely with founder Barry Hardy for over 35 years, Don joined TDS in 1996. He recognized that TDS was a company with outstanding principles, extraordinary people and an exceptional desire to be the best at what it does – and Don wanted to be a part of that. So when, after a year, he was asked to be the director of the newly formed Process Technology Division, he gladly accepted.

Don is the inventor of two Amoco Process Patents: one for the control of fouling in Hydrocracking and Hydroprocessing Reactors and one for the control of coking in Pyrolysis Cracking Furnaces.

His experience in process operations, process chemical sales, manufacturing and training gives him broad insight into most aspects of the design and implementation of human performance improvement in the hydrocarbon industry.

On a personal note, Don is a dog lover whose first dog, Sam, a black Labrador Retriever lived to the ripe old age of 13. In recounting one of his many Sam stories, Don has been heard to say his dog was smarter than Lassie, Old Yeller and Rin-Tin-Tin combined.