For billionaire oilman, Bakken boom brings chance to dabble in politics

Harold Hamm recently sat in a corner of the Railhead Diner in Lexington, Okla., having polished off a plate of meatloaf and savored a bite of the fried pie with chocolate filling. Hamm, who grew up just across the tracks, has a lot to savor these days. As the youngest of a sharecropper’s 13 children, Hamm spent his earliest years nearby picking cotton until the first snowfall or Christmas, whichever came first. Today, the 66-year-old Hamm is a multibillionaire who could buy the entire town several times over. An early believer in the notion that the techniques of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing could be merged to unlock new layers of oil, he is the chief executive of Continental Resources, the leading exploration company in the booming Bakken Formation, which stretches across Montana, North Dakota and Saskatchewan. His 68% stake in the company is currently worth $7.7 billion, and Forbes recently ranked him the world’s 76th-richest person. Now Hamm is exploring politics, too. He has hosted a fundraiser for Mitt Romney and recently donated $985,000 to Restore Our Future, a super PAC devoted to supporting Romney’s candidacy. While super PACs are supposed to be independent, the oilman has also become a member of Romney’s energy advisory team, feeding the candidate optimistic assessments about U.S. oil production. Hamm is trying to take the lessons of the Oklahoma and North Dakota oil patches and apply them in Washington for the nation’s benefit—and his own. Read the full feature from The Washington Post here.