If any company’s record reflects the remarkable recent history of the Bakken/Three Forks oil play in the northern plains of the United States, it’s that of Oklahoma-based Continental Resources Inc. Likewise, Continental’s founder, chairman and CEO Harold Hamm, 65, has emerged as the industry leader in the forefront of championing the Bakken petroleum system’s increasing importance as a source of U.S. crude.
Hamm was ranked in the March issue of Forbes as the 30th richest person in America and 76th richest person in the world with a personal fortune valued at about $11 billion. He founded Continental’s predecessor, Shelly Dean Oil Co., 45 years ago in Oklahoma.
Renamed Continental in the 1990s, the independent has grown rapidly in the past decade — last year revenue climbed 34 percent — and is currently the 14th-largest oil company in America, pumping most of its oil and gas out of North Dakota’s Bakken.
The Bakken, a tight oil resource play covering an area in the United States and Canada roughly the size of West Virginia, currently ranks as the largest continuous onshore oil accumulation in the Lower 48 states.
Talent for elephant hunting
Hamm grew up in rural Oklahoma, youngest of 13 kids born to sharecroppers. He went to work in the oil fields as a teenager and soon developed a passion for finding oil. After becoming a wildcat driller, he founded Shelly Dean.
Hamm’s uncanny knack for finding black gold eventually made him a legend in the industry. But it was his ability to make key acquisitions of land and assets and effectively lead a team of innovators that has propelled his company down the high-growth path that it travels today. “Oil exploration requires creativity, curiosity and a willingness to take bold risks, like drilling where others have given up on finding oil. We continue to guide the company with a no-blame policy for exploration and innovation endeavors so we retain that tolerance for risk that has brought us our greatest finds. Our culture has made us who we are, and while we have plans to keep on growing, we plan to never outgrow the spirit that got us here,” Hamm recently told investors.
In 1990, Hamm changed his company’s name to Continental Resources, and soon after the independent discovered Ames Hole, one of only six oil-producing meteorite craters in the nation.
By 1995, Continental had ventured into North Dakota where it discovered the Cedar Hills field — the seventh-largest onshore field in the lower 48 United States ranked by liquid proved reserves — and began to develop the field exclusively through precision horizontal drilling, an industry first.
Belief in the Bakken
Hamm, after nearly 50 years of working in the oil industry, believes in the Bakken.
Acting on a growing conviction that the Bakken Shale offered America an untapped treasure in domestic oil production, he purchased 300,000 acres in the North Dakota play in 2003. A year later, the company cracked the code for unlocking the Bakken’s tight rocks with the completion of the Heuer 1-17R well.
He has estimated recoverable oil from “the Bakken and Three Forks reservoirs collectively hold 24 billion barrels of potentially recoverable crude oil equivalent — 20 billion in oil and 4 billion in natural gas.”
In fact, the outspoken oilman has dubbed the Bakken “America’s Saudi Arabia.”
“I have been quoted as saying that of all the oil fields in North America, there’s just one Bakken, and I’ve believed it since Continental completed the Robert Heuer 1-17R in Divide County in 2004. The Heuer was the first commercially successful well in the North Dakota Bakken to be both horizontally drilled and fracture stimulated, and that early success stirred interest and investment. That well grew the Bakken into the play we know today,” Hamm told investors in 2011.
“Now here we are seven years later and Lynn Helms with the Department of Mineral Resources has confirmed that North Dakota will become the third-largest oil-producing state in the nation by third-quarter 2012. North Dakota surpassing California, and predicted to top Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay, too — that will put the Bakken just behind Texas,” he added.
Other company firsts soon followed, including completion in 2007 of the first 1,280 long-lateral multi-stage frac in North Dakota and in 2008, the first horizontal well in the Three Forks play.
“Equipping our people with the right tools enables Continental to confidently continue on the aggressive five-year growth path we have planned — a path which, after completing year one, we are on target to achieve,” Hamm said.
Today, Hamm is known as an outspoken critic of President Barack Obama’s green energy policies, which he calls “disappointing.” He was tapped earlier this year by Mitt Romney to head the presidential candidate’s Energy Policy Advisory Group.
Hamm is also a philanthropist and industry leader who recently co-founded the Domestic Energy Producers Alliance to preserve the oil and gas markets for oil and gas produced in the United States. In 2011, he was inducted into the Oklahoma Independent Petroleum Association’s Wildcatters Hall of Honor, the association’s highest recognition.
