Harold Hamm: The Man Who Bought North Dakota -- Bloomberg

Link here.

This is just one of many, many stories about Harold Hamm.

This is how the article begins:

Harold G. Hamm is lost. The 66-year-old founder, chairman, and chief executive of Continental Resources is steering a Chevy Tahoe past sunflower fields and grazing cows in western North Dakota. He’s found millions of barrels of oil in these low prairie hills, but on this bright fall day, he’s having trouble locating one of his own drilling rigs.

In the back seat, Hamm’s public-relations handler uses her smartphone to get their bearings. “So, we go three miles east, five north,” Hamm says in his Oklahoma drawl. “Got it.” Meandering past an idle John Deere combine and clutches of mobile homes where oil workers live, he points out wells his company has already drilled as if showing a guest around his home. He misses a turn, shrugs, stops, doubles back. “It’s a great day in North Dakota,” he says. “We’ll find it.”

Wow, I thought I was the only one who got lost. You have no idea how many times I got lost looking for a particular well.

I opined that an iPhone/iPad/Apple "app" for locating Bakken wells would be tremendous. My understanding is that such an "app" now exits.

From the article:

Hamm is the man who bought the Bakken, the shale formation that’s the biggest U.S. oil find since Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay in 1968. The Bakken stretches from central North Dakota into the northeastern corner of Montana and up into southern Saskatchewan and Manitoba. He leased his first acres and drilled his first wells in North Dakota nearly 20 years ago, and stayed with it when others gave up. Today, Continental, with a stock market value of $13.5 billion, vies with oil giants such as Hess for the most Bakken acres under lease (more than 900,000), the most drilling rigs (24), and the most wells (more than 350). Continental’s revenue has nearly tripled from two years ago to an expected $1.76 billion in 2011, while profits have grown sevenfold to an estimated $538 million, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Hamm and his family control 78 percent of the company’s shares, a stake valued at more than $10 billion.

The most intriguing part about Mr Hamm is how much he is a cheerleader for the Bakken. I think, to some extent, the Bakken is what it is because of what Mr Hamm did early on.