‘He’s there to run it’: Trump’s energy whisperer looks ready to call the shots at major oil trade association
Source: By Mike Soraghan, E&E News • Posted: Tuesday, August 18, 2026
Harold Hamm, the shale-oil pioneer President Donald Trump has called his “original oil guy,” may soon sit in the driver’s seat of one of the largest oil trade associations in the country, people familiar with the matter told Politico. Hamm, a wildcatter oil tycoon who regularly bends Trump’s ear while visiting Mar-A-Lago, merged his Domestic Energy Producers Alliance this summer with the much larger Independent Petroleum Association of America.
The move puts one of Trump’s biggest oil industry allies atop a trade group that employs 12 people to keep an adversarial eye on environmental regulations and promote a more parochial view of oil and gas production than Exxon Mobil, Chevron and other companies with a more international presence. It calls itself the oil industry’s “strongest presence in the nation’s capital.” The IPAA billed the merger, which received little public fanfare, as a way for the two groups to speak with one voice. But people familiar with the two groups expect that one voice to be Harold Hamm himself.