Without U.S. shale gas, a lot of Europeans would have frozen to death last winter after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, says America’s richest oil man.
By Christopher Helman, Forbes Staff
Harold Hamm, America’s richest oil man, started life as the youngest of 13 siblings, picked cotton barefoot on an Oklahoma farm, and became obsessed with prospecting for black gold after writing a high school term paper on oil. Over the next six decades, Hamm, 77, built up Continental Resources into what is now the largest privately owned oil and gas operation in the U.S., making Hamm and his family worth $17 billion. But in his new autobiography, Game Changer: Our 50-Year Mission To Secure America’s Energy Independence, this pioneer of “fracking” (he hates the term) would rather talk about how the technique has halted the “terminal decline” of America’s oil output and created a boom that gives it massive geopolitical power and the ability to export massive quantities of oil, and especially natural gas, in the form of LNG. Without fracking, says Hamm, a lot of Europeans would have frozen to death last winter after Vladimir Putin cut off supplies of Russian gas following the invasion of Ukraine.
Hamm sat down to talk about it with Forbes senior editor Chris Helman at his Oklahoma City headquarters.
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