Billionaire Harold Hamm Sees a Great Oil Fortune Still Untapped in US Shale

  • Forecasters see shale production reaching a peak by 2030
  • Hamm doesn’t rule out expanding into new basins with deals
Harold Hamm at his office in Oklahoma City.Photographer: Nick Oxford/Bloomberg
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The first thing that greets visitors entering the headquarters of billionaire Harold Hamm’s Continental Resources Inc. is a 9-foot-long statue of a snarling bull named Boe.

Boe — short for barrels of oil equivalent — is an apt symbol for a veteran wildcatter who’s still betting big on more crude production in the US. Hamm is a shale pioneer, the first to figure out how to drill miles-long wells sideways to unleash oil from North Dakota’s Bakken shale region. At the time, it was the biggest US oil find since Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay in 1968.