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US shale oil magnate Harold Hamm is expanding beyond North America, signing a deal with Turkey’s national oil company to develop oil and gas reserves.
Hamm’s Continental Resources, in a joint venture with US-based TransAtlantic Petroleum and Turkish Petroleum, plans to explore and extract resources in the Diyarbakir Basin and Thrace Basin, which are the focus of Turkey’s efforts to reduce the nation’s heavy reliance on energy imports.
Continental’s overseas expansion marks a strategic departure for its founder Hamm, who was a prominent donor to President Donald Trump and has helped shape the administration’s policy of unleashing US energy dominance. The 79-year-old billionaire pioneered the shale oil revolution in the US by developing new fracking techniques, which enabled producers to extract oil and gas from shale and other types of “tight” rock formations.
Doug Lawler, Continental’s chief executive, said Turkey held “immense potential” because of the scale of the nation’s “untapped resources”.
Continental is the largest oil producer in the Bakken shale field in North Dakota and Montana, and in recent years it expanded into Wyoming and the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico. In 2022 Hamm took Continental private in a deal valuing its equity at about $27bn.
Turkey produces just over 100,000 barrels of oil a day, a fraction of its 1.1mn b/d consumption. The country’s energy minister Alparslan Bayraktar said the partnership would “contribute to our goal of bringing Turkey’s oil and gas resources to our economy”.
Turkish Petroleum said recoverable reserves could reach 6bn barrels of oil and up to 20tn cubic feet of gas in the Diyarbakir basin and 20tn to 45tn cubic feet of gas in the Thrace Basin.
TransAtlantic Petroleum, a US-based producer, has been operating in Turkey for almost two decades.
