harold hamm

Hamm directly owns more oil and natural gas than any other American. How much? At least 190 million barrels of oil and natural gas equivalents.

Unlike BP and the other big dogs, he doesn't have any assets at all in the Gulf of Mexico.

Hamm has more than half his bounty in the Bakken, which stretches from North Dakota into Montana. Unlike most of the big shale plays, which are predominately natural gas, the Bakken gives up mostly oil. Estimates of reserves in the Bakken have jumped from 4 billion barrels of oil a year ago to more than 8 billion barrels now, thanks in large part to Hamm's finds. Analysts at IHS-CERA figure that given a decade of development the Bakken could be yielding 1 million barrels per day of oil and gas, up from 150,000 bpd today. A million bpd is approximately how much we can currently get from the Gulf of Mexico.

Hamm controls 800,000 acres in the 7-million-acre play. Others with big positions include Hess and Marathon Oil. Dallas billionaire Tim Headington made most of his fortune selling 350,000 acres in the Bakken to XTO Energy (since bought by ExxonMobil in 2008). Hamm's Company Continental, at a market value of $10 billion or so, could be a nice acquisition for a supermajor chased out of the deep water. Except he's not selling. "When all those folks come up from the Gulf, we want them to find that the last acres have just been leased," says Hamm with a smile."


Bakken looks more and more promising everyday.

http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/17/koch-hamm-bass-kaiser-business-energy-oil-billionaires.html?boxes=HomepageSpecialStorySection