Author Description

Obituary: August 14, 1929 - October 5, 2016Dan Allen Hughes, Sr., 87, eased quietly from this place while at his home surrounded by love on the morning of October 5, 2016. Dan was born August 14, 1929 in Monroe, Louisiana to Dan Greenwood and Winnie (Williams) Hughes. While in high school in Palestine, Texas, Dan worked summers on a roustabout maintenance crew on the hundreds of miles of United Gas' natural gas pipelines throughout East Texas. He earned a B.S. in Geology from Texas A&M College in 1951. After college, he served as 1st Lt. US Army artillery officer in Korea from 1951-1953, alongside his identical twin brother, Dudley J. Hughes. For their service, each was awarded a Bronze Star.Before traveling overseas, Dan spent many off-duty hours mapping the subsurface geology of southeastern New Mexico and purchased a federal lease there in 1952 for fifty cents, later selling it to an operator for an overriding royalty. Later, the discovery well for the Saladar Oil Field was drilled on this lease, and it is still producing today. It was a sign of things to come.Dan worked as a geologist for Union Producing Company from 1953-1962. He was self-employed as a consulting geologist from 1962-1964 until establishing the Beeville, Texas office of the partnership Hughes & Hughes with his twin brother Dudley, who operated out of Jackson, Mississippi. The company had numerous oil and gas discoveries along the U.S. Gulf Coast from Texas to Florida, as well as sizable gas condensate discoveries in Canada and Australia. In 1982, Dan opened the Dan A. Hughes Company in Beeville. The company began South American operations in 1996 operating in Colombia as HUPECOL (Hughes Petroleum Colombia) where they had many prolific discoveries. In addition, the Dan A. Hughes Company had many successful wells and large positions in the Barnett Shale in North Texas, Fayetteville Shale in Arkansas and the Eagle Ford Shale in South Texas. In 2005 the company changed to a limited partnership betwe