Eric Lipton and Rebecca F. Elliott
The executives dining at the White House to celebrate President Donald Trump’s $US300 million ($450.8 million) ballroom – and their role in financing it – were a who’s who of American industry.
Seated among them was billionaire Harold G. Hamm, founder of an oil company – Continental Resources – that is little known outside energy circles.
Not long ago, it seemed as if Hamm and his allies in the oil industry were losing. They were out of favour in Washington – and on Wall Street – shunned for contributing to climate change and failing to deliver the returns investors wanted.
But with Trump back in power, Hamm is, too.
The alliance between the two is now playing a big role in American energy. Together, they have remade federal policy to benefit oil and gas companies, including Hamm’s Continental, and put off the transition to greener alternatives such as solar power and batteries.
Hamm was among Trump’s earliest oil industry backers, and that loyalty – paired with more than $US2 million in campaign contributions – has earned him outsize influence.
Hamm, who recently adopted the title of chair emeritus as he stepped back at Continental, has used that influence to position loyalists for top administration jobs.
They include Chris Wright, a longtime fossil fuel executive and former director of an oil industry lobbying group that Hamm co-founded. Wright is now Trump’s energy secretary. The interior secretary job went to Doug Burgum, a former North Dakota governor and close ally of Hamm’s whose family has leased land to Continental for drilling.
Trump’s return to the White House is paying off handsomely for Continental, which has said it expects to benefit from expanded tax breaks. The company also recently secured long-sought permits from the Trump administration to drill for oil and natural gas in Wyoming.
At the same time, the Trump administration and Congress have moved to undo or weaken policies that threatened oil and gas, including fuel-efficiency standards, methane emissions regulations, and tax credits for electric vehicles and renewable power. Such rollbacks have helped offset the industry’s frustration with low oil prices and higher tariffs, which have squeezed profits this year.
Hamm and Continental declined interview requests and did not respond to written requests for comment. A White House spokesperson said in a written statement that Hamm was among the oil industry executives who offered Trump advice.
“The president frequently listens to the recommendations and concerns of many top stakeholders and business leaders to ensure America’s oil and gas industry has the adequate resources and capabilities to ‘DRILL, BABY, DRILL’ and deliver for the American people,” she said.
The Hamm-Trump partnership was birthed in 2012, when Trump, already flirting with a presidential run, invited Hamm to visit him at Trump Tower in New York.
The two men, so different on paper, had much in common.
Both were contrarians. Both used symbols of American patriotism to boost their own pursuits. The oilman pledged his support should Trump run for president.
“I think he has a great deal of confidence in what I tell him,” Hamm told a Washington Post reporter in 2016.
That year, Hamm was among the first oil and gas executives to endorse Trump, declaring at the Republican convention that “President Trump will fuel America’s future and become the first president to achieve American energy independence”.
Born a few months after the end of World War II, Hamm moved around as a young boy before settling in Enid, Oklahoma. In his early 20s, he started a one-truck oil field services company and eventually began drilling his own oil wells, building Continental into a major player in the West.
A breakthrough came in March 2004, on the edge of an oil and gas deposit known as the Bakken in North Dakota. Hamm had a hunch that if he applied new drilling techniques – now known as horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing – he could squeeze oil out of the ground where others had failed. He was right.
Continental’s success helped propel North Dakota’s oil output, ushering in the fracking boom that would transform the United States into the world’s top producer of oil and natural gas. Hamm took the company public in 2007, by which point he was a wealthy man with growing influence in Oklahoma City, where Continental is based.
After Trump took office in 2017, Hamm was not shy about leaning on the administration and Republicans in Congress.
On one visit to Washington, in June 2018, the oilman used his clout to push for weakening automotive fuel-efficiency standards.
Hamm told House lawmakers that the rules were “archaic and onerous”.
The Trump administration soon rolled back the US fuel efficiency rules.
That was just the start. Hamm’s lobbying group, the Domestic Energy Producers Alliance, worked to weaken protections for threatened species such as sage grouse. It also lobbied the Trump administration to cut regulations intended to curb air pollution near oil drilling sites.
Both the air pollution and wildlife protection measures were curtailed.
Before long, however, Hamm found himself in the cold.
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, oil demand shrivelled and prices plunged. Continental’s market valuation dropped below $US4 billion, from about $US22 billion 18 months earlier, wiping out a large chunk of Hamm’s wealth. He held about 80 per cent of the company’s stock at the time.
Meanwhile, concerns about climate change were growing. Partly under pressure from environmentalists and some policymakers, big investors began to squeeze public corporations to curb fossil fuel use and production.
After Joe Biden took office in 2021, Congress encouraged electric vehicle purchases, invested billions of dollars into charging stations and subsidised battery manufacturing.
By this time, many larger oil companies had begun committing themselves to cleaner energy.
Hamm took the opposite tack, shielding Continental from investor pressure by taking the company private in 2022.
By April 2024, Hamm was marshalling support for Trump. He helped to organise many oil and gas executives to dine with Trump that northern spring, including Wright, then CEO of fracking company Liberty Energy.
Trump pressed the group at that dinner to raise $US1 billion for his campaign, in return for his promise to do away with a laundry list of regulations. (In the end, oil and gas interests gave about $US75 million to Trump’s re-election effort.)
“It is a dream team of unimaginable proportions,” Hamm said after Trump tapped Wright as energy secretary and Burgum as interior secretary.
A mechanical humming, mixed with the clanking of steel, echoed one recent evening in central Wyoming. This site, where mule deer and pronghorn antelope outnumber humans, is where Continental and others hope to drill up to 5000 wells.
Perhaps no place better demonstrates what Hamm has accomplished since Trump returned to office.
The Interior Department first approved the project in late 2020.
But after local groups sued, a federal judge blocked any new permits, saying the government had failed to adequately evaluate how drilling would affect the environment. (The federal government owns many underground oil and gas deposits and therefore controls permitting, even though private individuals often own the land.)
This was more than just a frustration for Hamm: The Bakken in North Dakota, Continental’s lifeblood, was in decline, and the company needed new targets.
With Trump back in power, Continental and others quickly moved to get around the roadblocks. They had submitted a report from a consultant they hired that concluded that oil drilling would not affect groundwater.
On a second front, Continental and its allies had asked the Interior Department to open up more federal land for lease in Wyoming and elsewhere and accelerate related environmental reviews.
Hamm, of course, had a close supporter in Burgum, who as interior secretary oversees oil and gas leasing.
This past northern spring, barriers to Hamm’s ambitions suddenly lifted. In April, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management in effect endorsed the industry’s groundwater report.
That same month, Burgum announced that his agency was slashing what had sometimes been a multiyear review of permits on federal lands nationwide to no more than 28 days.
‘We’re in a very good spot in the US. We are in the era of abundance.’
Harold Hamm
The department said it did no special favours for Hamm. “Efforts to improve permitting efficiency are long-standing and based on agency policy – not on any individual or company,” Alyse Sharpe, an agency spokesperson, said in a statement. She also said that agency specialists had “independently reviewed” the industry-funded groundwater data.
The benefits for Continental were clear. In August, the Interior Department began to issue Hamm’s company dozens of new permits to drill in Wyoming’s Converse County.
Continental’s production in Wyoming hit a record as of late this year. The push has brought mixed reviews from longtime residents.
“The problem is, when there is oil, no one in my lifetime has decided to just leave it in the ground,” said Maria Katherman, who grew up on a nearby ranch and is now part of a group suing to block the new project.
These permits to drill are just the start.
A special Biden-era fee on methane emissions – which penalises companies that emit large amounts of the pollutant – has been put on hold, saving oil companies such as Continental hundreds of millions of dollars in the coming decade.
Other items high on Hamm’s wish-list included rolling back policies that forced vehicle manufacturers to build more electric and hybrid vehicles; and increasing tax breaks for oil companies to pump carbon dioxide underground to extend the life of ageing oil fields, as in North Dakota. Trump has also helped expand exports of natural gas.
There are still some significant obstacles for Continental, including the higher Trump-era tariffs that have pushed up prices for drilling equipment. But Hamm is happy with his friend back in the White House.
”We’re in a very good spot in the US,” Hamm told oil executives this year. “We are in the era of abundance.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times
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