When Harold Hamm talks U.S. energy, President-elect Donald Trump listens.

Hamm, the founder and executive chairman of privately-held Continental Resources, ran point on drumming up oil and gas industry support and funding for Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.

In an exclusive interview with Hart Energy, Hamm refused to take any credit for Trump’s election victory last week—but acknowledged the role he played in getting the U.S. energy industry to rally behind the former president.

“Obviously it’s no secret that I helped gather the industry up, oil and gas producers and the entire industry,” Hamm said. “They got really broad coverage about the meeting at Mar-a-Lago with the president—[I] had dinner with him with the entire group.”

It was an “interesting” and productive dinner with Trump, with influential energy executives giving their piece about the health and direction of the oil and gas sector.

“And also, he got to listen to all the bad things that the Biden administration had brought forward in the last four years—that they were still bringing forward,” Hamm said.

But after Trump’s resounding victory at the ballot boxes last week—and with both houses of Congress potentially back under Republican control (the GOP won the Senate and is four seats shy of retaining the House—Hamm expects to see results for the U.S. energy industry.

From a “laundry list” of hundreds of items that need to be done, or undone, a handful stick out to Hamm.

Permitting reform

Impediments put in place by the Biden administration to slow or halt oil and gas leasing activity on federal lands or in the Gulf of Mexico should be removed, Hamm said.

“The mineral wealth of the U.S. government is tremendous, but you have to develop that,” he said. “Certainly, Trump will do that. Our economy needs it, federal government needs it.”

The Biden administration eventually resumed auctioning drilling leases on federal lands in 2022—when costs for fuel and power were skyrocketing—but with smaller acreage packages offered and higher royalties for producers.

Offshore leasing has been limited to the central and western Gulf of Mexico in favor of the Biden administration’s lofty goal of expanding offshore wind power generation.

But it’s not just upstream. The permitting process needs to be simplified and streamlined to build out pipelines, downstream facilities or even infrastructure like new housing, Hamm said.

“Permitting affects everything,” he said. “You’ve got to turn that loose, and you just need some new people to do it.”

Un-pausing LNG

The Biden administration also drew ire from the U.S. oil and gas industry earlier this year for “pausing” the issuance of LNG export licenses to non-free trade agreement countries.

The administration said the pause would allow time for a study analyzing the impacts of U.S. LNG exports on the climate, the economy and national security.

Industry executives and analysts say the pause has negatively impacted the nation’s reputation as a reliable exporter—at a time when countries like Qatar and Australia are actively expanding global LNG market share.

Many oil and gas executives have lobbied for Trump to un-pause the LNG pause, Hamm included.

“In the U.S. we certainly got a whole lot of natural gas,” Hamm said.

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Defanging federal agencies

Hamm also pushed back on the outgoing administration using federal agencies to stymie the oil and gas industry’s day-to-day business.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) intervened in several large-scale upstream M&A transactions, including Exxon Mobil’s $60 billion acquisition of Permian Basin giant Pioneer Natural Resources, Chevron’s $55 billion acquisition of Hess Corp. and the merger between gas producers Chesapeake Energy and Southwestern Energy.

The FTC barred Pioneer CEO Scott Sheffield and Hess CEO John Hess from serving on the Exxon and Chevron boards, respectively, alleging the executives worked to collude with the OPEC cartel to fix global commodity prices.

The Biden administration also frequently tapped the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for matters related to power plant pollution, methane emissions from upstream production and vehicle tailpipe emissions standards.

“They used every single agency as much as they could to deter the industry, delay the industry,” Hamm said, “and basically live up to their promise to get us off fossil fuels going forward.”

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Don’t undo everything

There’s a lot for the new Trump administration to undo when they take office in January, Hamm argues. But there are things Biden did that should probably stay in place, he said.

One might be tax subsidies for emerging technologies and infrastructure projects for carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS).

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) included substantial improvements to the 45Q tax credit for capturing and storing carbon emissions from industrial facilities and power plants.

In 2022, Hamm’s Continental Resources made a strategic investment in Summit Carbon Solutions, a company building CCUS transport and storage projects across the Midwest. And prospects for Summit’s projects have reportedly been encouraged by the enhanced tax credits passed under the IRA.

Hamm’s industry peers also hope to tap IRA tax credits for CCUS projects, like Occidental’s direct air capture (DAC) facility under construction in the West Texas Permian Basin.

“I would be thinking that some of these [tax subsidies] would stay in place,” Hamm said.

While the U.S. should probably allow new tax subsidies for emerging CCUS technologies, it should review decades-old tax breaks for mature technologies like wind and solar, he argued. 

“If you’re going to start whacking subsidies, start there,” he said.

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