00:01:04.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:10.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:19.000You know, I started this company when I was 21 years old and built my whole career and this company as well over a long period of time.
00:02:30.000And so I saw a lot of changes within the industry.
00:02:34.000And one of those, of course, is horizontal drilling.
00:02:39.000And everybody wonders how this industry has changed over so quickly when everybody thought we were in terminal decline with production falling and eventually being produced out here in America.
00:02:56.000And it was long since beyond the peak of production in the country and how we turned that around and basically triple crude oil production and quadruple natural gas production and did it within a 20-year time span, if you will.
00:03:15.000So it's been a wonderful ride, a wonderful change.
00:03:19.000And one thing happened from people like myself and others that made this happen through new technology and innovation called horizontal drilling that brought all this about and made it possible to bring America energy, make it energy independent again, and the leader in the world in both oil production and natural gas production.
00:03:49.000And a little bit of it is about me, but it's not a me book.
00:03:53.000It's about an industry book and how this took place.
00:03:58.000And it's been, you know, you write one of these books and you never know about the readability of it, whether it's going to be easy read or tough read or going to be fun read or not.
00:04:10.000But actually, this luckily turned out to be a fun read.
00:04:15.000And we've had great response and it's become a bestseller in so many aspects.
00:04:22.000So I want the audience to understand this is a very tough industry.
00:04:26.000And Harold, when you started, correct me if I'm wrong, you were considered to be a wildcatter, right?
00:04:30.000So you were in kind of the space where it was a lot of risk, a lot of potential reward.
00:04:36.000And this was literally the Wild West of oil and gas exploration.
00:05:27.000And anyway, 10 years later, I actually got a chance to go to college.
00:05:34.000But I learned from people and I learned the skills of the industry from a lot of people that mentored to me over that period of time and maybe got lucky.
00:06:02.000And anyway, with my first ideas, geologic ideas, I found oil field and started building production.
00:06:13.000And so it was, that's what you lived off of, geologic ideas and concepts and taking risk.
00:06:25.000And certainly that's still what we do in this industry, but to a lesser extent, perhaps, than we ever did before, because a lot of us because the technology that we've developed and our ability to produce the source beds themselves, the shales, where oil and gas come from.
00:06:48.000And anyway, it's less, perhaps less of a risk now than ever before.
00:06:55.000But there's still a lot to this business and a lot of risk associated with it.
00:07:02.000I honestly wish our politicians would talk more about oil and gas and be proud of it.
00:07:08.000They've allowed the lies from the green movement and the climate alarmists to really create, in my opinion, too much timidity around the assets we have here in America and really why we should be exploring them and using them.
00:07:22.000President Donald Trump, thanks to your advice, by the way, I just hope everyone understands.
00:07:25.000Harold Hamm was one of the first major supporters behind Donald Trump.
00:07:29.000You brought him to an OU football game, if I remember correctly.
00:07:32.000You raised money for him when other people didn't.
00:07:33.000And you were his number one advisor on energy.
00:07:37.000And I was in the room many times when he said, oh, and Harold here, you know, he knows he got America to be energy independent.
00:07:44.000We're losing that footing, which is bad for geopolitics and many other reasons.
00:07:48.000Walk us through that, Harold, because we had four years of really an energy renaissance where we got to a place where it was almost too good at times.
00:08:42.000We actually got to be energy independent in 2019.
00:08:47.000And yes, we fell back below that just slightly.
00:08:52.000Basically, on a BTU basis, we're there, but it's barely, we're barely able to hang on to it with a lot of the policies that's been handed down.
00:09:03.000So when I look and I hear people talk about the relative decline of America and its sphere of influence around the world and what's happening, and part of it is because this administration disclaims our energy renaissance that would be the envy of the entire world that's been created here in America.
00:09:28.000And this administration doesn't want anything to do with it.
00:09:35.000This is what made America great, continues to make America great, and certainly should be owned.
00:09:43.000I mean, this is going to be around the next hundred years, folks, oil and gas, and for awfully good reason of what some of us risk takers have done to create this energy renaissance in the world right here in America.
00:10:00.000And so anyway, it kind of sickens me to see how this administration has gone off and left field on energy.
00:10:27.000The book, I encourage all of you guys to check out Game Changer by Harold Hamm, America's oil and gas champion from the wonderful state of Oklahoma, which is the only state in the country to say that every county voted for Donald Trump.
00:12:37.000You could say that we're the Saudi Arabia of natural gas.
00:12:39.000I mean, just we keep discovering even more, not just in the Balkan, but the Permian and the Marcellus.
00:12:44.000What have we been blessed with here in America?
00:12:47.000Well, fortunately, we're blessed with a lot of sedimentary rock that contain oil and gas.
00:12:53.000So, that's a wonderful thing, Charlie.
00:12:56.000Yeah, that was, you know, the Saudi Arabia of America.
00:13:01.000That article was written by Stephen Moore, you know, with an interview that I gave to him when he was at the writer for the Wall Street Journal.
00:13:14.000Basically, that was kind of a preview of what we were doing and what was possible with horizontal drilling, you know, at that time going forward.
00:13:24.000And, you know, a lot of people were kind of shocked by that.
00:13:28.000They thought, wow, what's he talking about?
00:13:32.000But here we are, you know, when you look forward to 2023, a dozen years later, and we're the number one producer of crude oil in the world, number one producer of natural gas in the world.
00:13:49.000And who thought we could be there and do that?
00:13:52.000Only a few of us were involved in what we were doing at the time, and that was with horizontal drilling.
00:13:59.000And back then, there wasn't everybody doing it.
00:14:02.000Today, everybody is basically involved.
00:14:06.000And it's an entire transformation of our industry has been transformed with this technology of horizontal drilling.
00:14:17.000The ability to drill down two miles, turn right, turn left, go two to three miles, then reservoirs that normally wouldn't produce if drilled vertically that contained hydrocarbon but had low permeability and porosity, and we call them tight reservoirs, yet could give up tremendous amounts of oil and gas.
00:14:42.000And so that's transformed the industry.
00:14:44.000So it's not your grandfather's oil and gas company that you could think about back in the 70s and 80s or the 50s that basically built this country that we have.
00:15:11.000Basically, we're able to hold flat production in the U.S. with some 600 rigs, drilling rig, compared to in the boom of 1981, there was 4,580 rigs running in the U.S.
00:15:28.000So that's the degree of transformation that we're talking about here.
00:15:34.000So will oil and gas be here a heck of a long time?
00:18:10.000So, you know, Charlie, when they tell you something isn't going to happen, I've decided with this administration, you better bank on that it's going to happen.
00:18:17.000And we've seen this with gas stove and other natural gas appliances where the administration has taken a very concerted effort to, through the regulatory process, to restrict manufacturers' ability to produce good products the consumer wants.
00:18:33.000The ceiling fan thing was a surprise to a lot of us.
00:18:36.000You know, we've been fighting the fight with gas stoves and furnaces and air conditioners and portable generators and things like that.
00:18:43.000But I don't know how much energy efficiency you can squeeze out of a tiny little ceiling fan.
00:18:47.000It's really quite concerning because, frankly, it's a consumer choice issue and administration is trying to take away that choice.
00:19:02.000You know, when Biden administration came in in January of 2021, one of the many things that they did, which was actually below the radar, because we're all paying attention to the Keystone XL and the leasing issue, was they sent out an executive order to the Department of Energy to go back and revisit all of the regulations and all of the energy efficiency requirements that they had applied on appliance manufacturers under the Trump administration.
00:19:26.000And DOE, the politicals in the DOE, came back and said, you're right, we're going to go after these new about nine different appliances because we think we can squeeze more energy efficiency.
00:19:35.000And or we can restrict the type of, In particular, gas stove issue, we restrict the use of fossil fuels for things like water heaters and furnaces.
00:19:43.000That's really what's going on right now.
00:19:45.000The ceiling fan issue is just the one thing that we're we all have ceiling fans in our houses.
00:19:50.000We may not have gas stoves, but it begins to impact everybody, and particularly the small manufacturers that impacts.
00:19:56.000So, this is just kind of this, what I would call a crusade on domestic convenience items, the gas stoves, ceiling fans.
00:20:06.000This is awfully strange, nanny police state under the guise of climate change and climate emergency.
00:20:27.000They've made that known really from day one and before.
00:20:30.000And so, there's a two-pronged attack here, is what we see: on one hand, the federal government can regulate energy efficiency for appliances and appliance manufacturers.
00:20:40.000And they've been able to squeeze a total of nine cents a month out of the new natural gas stove regulations.
00:20:46.000Nine cents a month is what they had to come back and revise their estimates about.
00:20:50.000The other prong of the attack that we are dealing with, frankly, is at the local level, where local governments, primarily those that are run by in blue states and run by Democrats and liberals and progressives, they're actually putting the restrictions on the ability to cook up new buildings and existing buildings to natural gas.
00:21:09.000And so, you may be able to get a gas stove if we win the fight over here, but you may not get natural gas to your house to fire your natural gas stove.
00:21:18.000Again, it's this, it is very much a war on fossil fuels.
00:21:21.000Nine cents a month is all they're ringing out, and so it doesn't really make a lot of sense.
00:21:25.000You can clarify, you can tell that it really is a climate agenda more than an energy efficiency agenda.
00:21:31.000Yeah, and so this we're constantly playing defense on this, and going to the home use goods is really interesting.
00:21:38.000The gas stoves one they assured us it wasn't happening, and now it is happening.
00:21:46.000So, the regs are out, the comment period is out, and that's what caught everybody's attention.
00:21:50.000The bigger sort of philosophical approach is how far down in the weeds are they willing to go to restrict our choice.
00:21:56.000That's why this gas stove thing is so intrusive to people.
00:22:01.000It's like the local government kicking your front door in and coming in and looking around and making casting judgments on how you raise your family.
00:22:09.000They point to your stove and say, Look, you're putting your children at risk because they may get asthma, which isn't true.
00:22:15.000Uh, the question again is how far down into our daily lives into the privacy issue are they willing to go?
00:22:20.000It's one thing to have a $50,000 electric vehicle mandated or a thousand-dollar gas stove, but a hundred dollar feeling ceiling fan just seems incredibly intrusive.
00:22:30.000And I guarantee you that the revised saving estimates they come back on ceiling fans is going to be even less than nine cents.
00:23:13.000The reason why is because we are one of the largest contributors to the federal budget besides the income tax.
00:23:18.000And so, we're now producing 12 billion barrels a day.
00:23:22.000But the administration says, Well, and the president has said, is we want to reduce that federal production to zero.
00:23:28.000If you do that, Charlie, that creates a market gap of almost a million barrels a day, which puts us right back to where we were last year at this time.
00:23:35.000Again, 25% of all the oil and gas assets in the United States are onshore.
00:23:40.000We account for about 10% of the overall production.
00:23:43.000If the administration says we're taking it away, then they create this market gap, which pushes our prices back up to $125, $130 a barrel.
00:23:54.000The way they do that is they control it through the very complex permitting process and the number of leases that can be nominated and accepted.
00:24:02.000Again, in my... 30 years working in this industry in Washington, D.C., I've never seen a more unfavorable regulatory or legislative environment than the one we've gone through for the last two years.
00:24:13.000I mean, so if production has increased, why are gas prices so high?
00:24:17.000Yeah, so one of the reasons why production has increased is when we go in and we drill a well, sometimes we don't always complete that at the same time.
00:24:28.000And so those wells can be had, and it's called drilled but uncompleted.
00:24:32.000And what happened was, if you recall pre-COVID, the Saudis and the Russians took it to the U.S. shale producers.
00:24:38.000They're saying, we're going to drive you out of business.
00:24:40.000And so they started cutting prices and cutting prices and cutting prices, which meant the U.S. shale producers had to drill more and more wells.
00:24:47.000And then COVID hit and the man collapse took place.
00:24:50.000And what we had was thousands and thousands of wells that were already drilled, but weren't completed.
00:24:57.000And what's happened is when the Biden administration came into the American doing more leases, well, those wells began to be completed.
00:25:04.000So you see that those production levels are now because of the drilling work that we did during the Trump administration.
00:25:10.000The problem is the Saudis, as you know, went through this million dollar million barrel a day cut globally.
00:25:16.000And so they have put the squeeze on global prices while the U.S. producers are not in the position to be what's called a swing producer anymore.
00:25:24.000We're producing as much oil and gas as we can, but we can't keep up with the Saudi cut, unfortunately.
00:25:29.000So if you can't keep up with the cut, then the raising of prices is not a supply issue then.
00:25:36.000Again, this gets into the complexity of how do you, for gasoline prices and diesel prices, it goes back to the complexity of what type of oil we are producing in the United States versus globally.
00:25:47.000In Texas, we produce, you know, the West Texas intermediate was called a light crude.
00:25:53.000The heavy crude has more sulfur content, and that's what our refineries for decades have been refining because that was the way we were importing oil and refining it that way.
00:26:04.000So we're actually exporting the oil that we're producing here to the refineries in Europe and elsewhere who like that crude, where we have to bring it in.
00:26:12.000And so we're still subject, unfortunately, to the global prices because we have to import Saudi and Venezuelan crude right now.
00:26:19.000So from a legislative perspective, they are talking about abolishing fossil fuels and transitioning us to a green economy.
00:26:29.000We're seeing whispers of this in New York, for example, where they've completely eliminated almost all fracking.
00:26:35.000What would that mean for the American economy?
00:26:37.000Well, the fact of the matter is they cannot get from here to there.
00:26:41.000They don't have, they don't have, we don't have the infrastructure in place.
00:26:44.000We don't have the, if we went to full electrification, we simply don't have the generation capacity without a baseload that the natural gas provides.
00:26:52.000And this is what's so frustrating to us is because 60% of the greenhouse gas emissions that have taken place, the United States has led the world in doing that.
00:27:00.000And that has taken place because we have switched from coal to natural gas.
00:27:11.000The fact is the biggest matter is that there's not the infrastructure for me to go outside my hometown and go on a longer trip to say, you know, we had to go to Salt Lake, for example, this weekend and we didn't drive it because we didn't know if there was going to be a charger available for us to come back.
00:27:27.000And they're selling us a bill of goods, to be honest with you.
00:27:31.000So is there a website you could direct our audience to for more information, something that if they wanted to dive deeper into this?
00:27:39.000Yeah, on the appliance side, the natural gas, the ceiling fans and stoves, handsoffmystove.com is a little side project that the U.S. Oil and Gas Association started.
00:27:49.000We did that to kind of help people, and we're all, it's a volunteer organization to help people sort of stay on top of what the... what was happening in their state or in their town and to give them the top two or three things that are happening each week on the appliance side.
00:28:03.000And on the just general oil and gas side, there's a lot of different websites, the U.S. Oil and Gas Association, USOGA.org, APIA.org, a lot of those other trade associations have some, we have some excellent information.
00:28:16.000The problem is, Charlie, that we've got great information and we're really lousy at getting our message across a lot of times.
00:28:22.000And I will be the first to admit that that's our problem.
00:28:24.000Well, we need to start to get the truth out because this is civilizational type stuff that's happening here.
00:28:30.000The entire civilization comes down to whether or not you have energy.
00:28:34.000If you cannot fuel your economy, if you cannot fuel your life, so much of Western prosperity is built on the prerequisite of abundant, cheap energy.
00:28:47.000Fidelity Charitable released its latest giving report.
00:28:50.000According to the report, its account holders in 2022 recommended $11 billion to nonprofits in the mix, Planned Parenthood.
00:28:57.000In fact, according to the report, Planned Parenthood was just the sixth most popular nonprofit among Fidelity charitable account holders last year.
00:29:31.000Only a first world country that has been infected by bad ideas, that has been mesmerized by an ideological academic cancer could be entertaining something as stupid as not using our oil and natural gas.
00:29:50.000So, you know, on any given day or at any given point in time, in any given day in the United States, 60% of the electricity is being generated is coming from fossil fuels.
00:29:58.000It doesn't matter if it's California or if it's New York or wherever.
00:30:01.000That's basically the energy portfolio for the United States.
00:30:04.000And the reason why is because natural gas and or coal, but from my perspective, natural gas, that is the most stable and most reliable.
00:30:12.000But, you know, the price of natural gas has been largely the same, hovering with some minor price fluctuations.
00:30:18.000It's been largely the same for the last 20 years.
00:30:20.000And so that has what gives you assurance that when you turn on your lights, the lights will come on.
00:30:27.000It gives you the assurance that when you jump on a Zoom meeting, the Zoom meeting will come on.
00:30:32.000The administration, for whatever reason, thinks that that is bad.
00:30:36.000And so they're put in this concerted effort to put us in an energy portfolio, an electricity portfolio in the United States that is largely unreliable, primarily when it's driven by renewables.
00:30:49.000If you think about it, if you go to a third world country, you don't know if and when the lights will go off.
00:30:56.000And honestly, you can be sitting in a hotel and the lights will flicker and the odds are that the diesel generators kick in.
00:31:02.000And that's what makes us a first world country is when you have stable electricity and stable energy, then you have stable healthcare, you have stable business, you have stable agriculture.
00:31:12.000And for whatever reason, they're pushing us because it is a control issue.
00:31:31.000And to be honest with you, you know, I got in trouble last week because I referred to the White House press secretary as Baghdad Barbie because she's, you know, it's this is she's sitting there saying everything's fine.
00:32:58.000It's been both the Russians and the Chinese, but the biggest enemy, unfortunately, is within, because if you look at the philanthropy that is there, four billionaires have put, individual billionaires have put $2 billion into the climate messaging system alone.