Harold Hamm is Still Wildcatting After All These Years
As the founder and chairman of Continental Resources reflects on 25 years of Bakken horizontal development, he urges his fellow U.S. producers to “never quit exploring.”
“You never quit looking. You never quit exploring. People need to turn their attention back to exploration up there again in the Williston.” —Harold Hamm, founder and chairman, Continental Resources. (Source: Lawrence Jenkins/Hart Energy)
Continental Resources is a $30 billion, multibasin—and now international—oil company today. It’s a far cry from the company’s humble beginnings: Hamm and a single well-service truck working in the oil fields of Oklahoma.
In 1967, he founded Shelly Dean Oil Co., named after his two oldest daughters. The company would later evolve into Continental, now among the largest privately held U.S. oil producers.
For Hamm, Hart Energy’s 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, his success and fortune are largely attributed to his pioneering work in the development of the Bakken Shale play in North Dakota.
As he describes it to Oil and Gas Investor, the combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing unlocked commercial development of the middle Bakken bench starting in eastern Montana in the early- to mid-2000s.
The middle Bakken, at around 10,000 ft deep, is the Williston Basin’s most targeted bench. The first middle Bakken horizontal well, Burning Tree State 36-2H, came online in Montana on May 26, 2000, with an IP of 196 bbl from a 1,700-ft lateral.
Horizontal drilling and fracking gave new life to the Williston Basin. The Bakken play has produced over 6 Bbbl of oil, and the majority of it since 2000, according to North Dakota and Montana production data.
But while the shale industry sought the repeatability of manufacturing mode, Hamm and Continental kept exploring. Today, Continental holds assets across the Anadarko, Permian and Powder River basins, in addition to the Bakken.
The company’s knack for exploration is on display in the Permian, where Continental is a leader in testing the basin’s deeper Woodford and Barnett zones.
Most public U.S. producers and Wall Street analysts are averse to exploration today, Hamm argues. But as U.S. onshore oil basins mature, plateau and eventually decline, producers will need to search elsewhere.
“You never quit looking. You never quit exploring,” Hamm said.
In recent years, Hamm has flexed his muscles in U.S. politics. He ran point during the 2024 presidential election, drumming up oil and gas industry support and fundraising for President Donald Trump’s campaign.
Hart Energy was first to report Hamm’s top picks for key energy-related cabinet positions in the new administration: Liberty Energy CEO Chris Wright for energy secretary, and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum for secretary of the interior. Wright and Burgum were later both confirmed for their posts by the U.S. Senate.
Chris Mathews: You were a major donor and supporter of Donald Trump’s campaign. What have you made of the administration so far?
Harold Hamm: Trump has probably got more done in the first 100-and-some days than any other president that I’m aware of. And he certainly made a lot of changes to right the ship. The former Biden administration had run us over a cliff.
But I think he’s changed gears and moved on to handling some of what he felt like were unfair situations around the world, mainly tariffs. So, that’s taken a toll on the economy and wiped out most of the “Trump bump,” as most people were calling the new economics of the administration.
[Tariffs have] been moderating in some instances, and I’m not sure if there will be some exclusions. I hope energy is one of those. Some of these are really, really complicated situations that may be excluded.
But most of Trump’s policies have been popular with the public. Everybody knows that some of these things need correcting, like government overspending. It’s one thing to talk about it, and another thing to do it. That’s what’s going on with the DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) group right now. Depending on where you are in the whole scheme of things—if you’re one of the employees that was cut back like USAID—you’re probably not very happy about Elon Musk and what’s going on.
But certainly, that’s something I think every American knows we needed to correct. There’s a huge amount of inefficiency in the federal government. So, that’s being dealt with.
It took a while to get everybody in through the cabinet process, everybody that he selected. But as a result, we’ve got some really great people on board. For instance, what I call the dream team of energy, with Doug Burgum at Interior and Chris Wright at the Department of Energy. And the new organizational aspect of the National Energy Dominance Council (NEDC), which brings all of energy from every different department back into one place. Doug Burgum is heading that up as chairman of NEDC, which is a tremendous thing.
I think that a lot of great things have been accomplished by this president, and a lot more to go.
CM: What kinds of activities or projects might NEDC tackle? Burgum recently talked about building a Marcellus-to-New England gas pipeline.
HH: There are several things that they’ve looked at. You brought up the Constitution Pipeline. Everybody’s familiar with the history of that pipeline and what that’s been through as far as permitting.
Certainly, there needs to be federal permitting for pipelines in this country. That’s something that could be taken up by [NEDC], and I expect something to be done on that.
We’re seeing some really big things occur right now in a lot of different departments. The SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission), for instance, backing off of some of the emissions reporting things that they had in policy. It was a huge burden on the industry, but that’s been eliminated now. It was [EPA Administrator] Lee Zeldin and [the EPA] that took up the initiative there.
The biggest thing was the entire shift in mentality from one administration to the other. The last administration wanted to end all fossil fuel use. This administration said, “Oh no, you can’t do that. The world can’t afford that, it’s not realistic, it’s not common sense.”
We’ve got to continue the work for the betterment of the environment and the climate, but we need to do it in a sensible manner as we go forward. With the dawning of artificial intelligence (AI) and what it’s going to take to drive that and the energy to make it happen—we’re seeing a whole new world with the amount of demand that’s coming about as a result of AI.
The oil and gas industry is a very dynamic industry. There’s so much happening. You’re always on the cutting edge, you’re never far behind it. Just like it’s been proven with horizontal drilling, now that we’re talking about 25 years of shale development. What drove that?
That, too, was the cutting edge of technology; how we could do something entirely different, and it changed the world of energy. It’s a very dynamic industry. You don’t have to wait very long until the next thing comes about, if you’re willing to see it through.
CM: It’s a nice segue into this milestone: 25 years of horizontal development of the middle Bakken Shale. What interested you in the Burning Tree well and the Elm Coulee field?
HH: You really have to start earlier than that. T. Boone Pickens had made a statement that getting natural gas from shale was one thing, but getting oil from shale was quite another—and none of us would live to see that happen.
Like I said: This industry is very dynamic, and you never say never.
You need to back up to, really, the first-ever horizontal oil field and how that came about—the Cedar Creek Anticline and Cedar Hills Field. That began in the mid-’90s.
It was basically two companies, Burlington Resources and Continental Resources, that developed that entire field at Cedar Hills. It was a 250 MMbbl-recoverable field, but nobody else wanted to take that on. But that wasn’t the Bakken. It was the Red River B Formation.
[Red River B] was essentially developed with drilling and didn’t require stimulation. It had great porosity, just didn’t have any permeability. But once you connected all the perm with the horizontal wellbore, these wells were commercial. And it wasn’t commercial to drill verticals. It was really quite a phenomenal field.
But what it did was prove to me that the shallow, thin-bedded reservoirs—around 14 ft thick was the entire thickness of the bed … But it proved that, in those thin-bedded reservoirs, horizontal drilling worked.
We charged our geological team here and said, “Guys, go find the next one.” We know the Williston Basin has a lot of thin-bedded reservoirs. Where’s the next one? It wasn’t very long after that in 1996 that a geologist here at Continental mapped Elm Coulee.
He brought it in and said, “This zone in the Bakken, the middle Bakken zone, ought to produce in this area if drilled horizontally—but you may need stimulation of some kind.” We’d done high-pressure air injections to help with recovery.
We took the idea to Bobby Lyle (of Lyco Energy), my friend in Dallas, and Headington Oil. We said, “Y’all have this Mustang Field there. Let’s form a JV [joint venture] going in together to drill horizontally. We’d use high-pressure air injection and see if we can make it commercial.” We all scratched our heads and looked at each other but didn’t get an answer.
But each one of them put a plan together to go into Elm Coulee and start drilling some horizontal wells and testing them with different practices. Bobby did a JV with Halliburton, with Halliburton furnishing the services and providing some of the capital for a leasehold swap to go in and helped him. And he started drilling.
They drilled the Burning Tree well that everybody refers to. Headington was right in there, started watching Bobby and doing some of the same stuff. And Continental and Harold Hamm sitting over here watching them, saying, “You boys go for it.”
As soon as they got commercial production, we were all over it and started developing right in there with them. We wound up with about a third of the play, and each one of them did. Elm Coulee turned out to be a very nice field. I think something around 500 MMbbl-recoverable area, and wells are still being drilled in it.
Then, Continental quickly stepped over and started looking geologically into North Dakota and started around there in 2003. And the rest is kind of history. We proved that up in North Dakota.
CM: Did you ever expect North Dakota to turn into the powerhouse it ended up becoming?
HH: I had hopes for it, I sure did. We had enough hopes for it that, over the next five years, we leased up to 1.3 million acres that Continental held. So yeah, we did.
But the growth in North Dakota came on slower. The pressures were different. What worked in Elm Coulee, with some natural porosity in that middle Bakken, did not work very well in North Dakota.
A lot of experimentation, trial and error, had to go on before we got to multi-stage completions and hit with a big hammer on stimulation. All of that worked. We had to develop the technology, using swell packers and stuff like that. It kept getting better and better.
But you’re right: Initially, the single pipeline out of North Dakota handled 80,000 bbl/d, which wasn’t a lot. Of course, they had a refinery there, Mandan, which helped. But it was very limited on infrastructure and a whole lot of other things that had to be built out.
All that has been done now, and we saw production soar. And thank God, we’ve always had about 15% of the state’s production and still do.
(Source: Rextag, Continental Resources)
CM: What will the Williston Basin’s future look like, between the Bakken and the deeper Three Forks benches?
HH: The Bakken kind of displaced exploration in a lot of ways for the past 25 years. The Bakken took a lot of concentration just on it, but we never quit looking. Some of the first core I ever looked at up there at the core library, we saw staining down in the Three Forks.
I wondered, how could that be down there? Where did that come from? It’s not a source bed. Of course, as the Bakken went through maturity, it put oil wherever it could go. Some of it leaked off up into Canada, for instance.
But somebody had to go and drill in it. So, we drilled a well down in the Three Forks and it proved to be separate somewhat from the Bakken. About a year later, everybody was drilling Three Forks. Now we see three to four benches of it that look productive.
So, you never quit looking. You never quit exploring. People need to turn their attention back to exploration up there again in the Williston.
But that takes different things and may take a change in policy. We’ve got a very high tax rate in North Dakota, when you look at 10%. That state’s got a huge sovereign fund that it’s built as a result of the production. I think that’s up to about $11 billion. So, it far exceeded their needs of financial funding in the state.
The future, as I see it, we’re still getting better. A lot of us have drilled those 4-mile wells. That’s worked well and will probably continue to improve. We’re making Tier 1 production out of what used to be Tier 3 in a lot of areas across the field. It is really hard to write off the Bakken when it keeps surprising you to the upside.
We’ve seen a lot of consolidation: Chord being formed out of a couple of companies. Conoco added Marathon’s production recently. We’ll probably see more of that as time goes on.
CM: Would Continental be interested in more Bakken M&A? Where else are you looking?
HH: Absolutely, the Bakken is one of our principal areas of focus and operation. We’ve got a great team that services that area.
But that’s not the only area. We still have the exploration mentality here at Continental. Our Anadarko footprint is very, very significant to the company and has been very meaningful. We’ve been the largest operator here in Oklahoma and the Midcontinent for an awful long time. We like the Anadarko Basin a whole lot.
We stepped into the Permian, led there by the geological team, and stepped into it in a pretty good way. We’ve got, I think, some 230,000 acres in the Permian, both in the Midland and Delaware basins. Of course, we made a fairly large acquisition from Scott Sheffield and Pioneer at one point, and it’s been meaningful to the company. We’re growing our base of production there.
You mentioned the Powder River Basin. We see that basin as a stacked pay basin, much like the Midcontinent Anadarko Basin. We’ve done a lot of drilling within several different benches and have a very large footprint. I think we’re one of the larger acreage holders there in the Powder River.
But you never quit looking. You mentioned Turkey. This play, we’ve watched for some time. Malone Mitchell, a friend of mine, has been in this play for 17 years and worked on it extensively. We’ve watched what he’s done.
We see some of the characteristics there that we’ve worked with in basins here in the U.S. So, we think some of the techniques that we’ve used here can work there, and it just hasn’t been applied.
The Turkish oil ministry is very familiar with what Continental has done here in the U.S. I think we could be helpful to them, and vice versa. So, we’re looking forward to our development there in Turkey.
CM: Do you think the future might look international for other U.S. shale companies?
HH: I think it’s beginning to. I think it’s good to see, at times, when we see maturity creeping in on the active basins here in the U.S. You need to look elsewhere, as well. I think EOG [Resources] exploring Bahrain is a good example. They have a history of exploration in their DNA.
Exploration is not a lost art, but it’s not like it was prior to the Bakken discovery and the manufacturing mode that a lot of people went into. Prior to that, exploration was something that every oil company had, practically.
There were a few people that were flippers and primarily just dealt with M&A. But most companies had a large degree of exploration and a lot of that has been lost. Continental is one of those companies where that’s very strong in our DNA.
CM: Natural gas is having a moment right now. What’s your outlook for U.S. gas?
HH: Yes, we have a lot of gas that we can turn on. You have to do it with an eye toward the market. Never get ahead of where the market is.
We’re involved in several things. Here in the Anadarko Basin, I think everybody’s aware of the joint venture we’ve had with SK [Energy] moving natural gas to South Korea for an awfully long time. That has every aspect of the business in it, from the drill bit through LNG to the final customer.
We continue to look. We haven’t been in the Haynesville big like some of the bigger pure-play gas players. If we had a reason, we just saw more intrinsic value in crude oil up to this point.
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