The huge Permian basin has turned from a dying oilfield into a juggernaut on global energy markets. A well-known Republican, he has used his oil wealth to back rightwing Republican candidates in Texas and advance conservative and evangelical Christian causes.ĭunn’s company, like the rest of the industry, was transformed when new shale drilling and fracking technologies helped unlock vast crude reserves in the oilfields of west Texas, where his group owned vast swaths of land that had been deemed too expensive to produce. A Texan, born and bred, he has been in the industry since the 1970s and founded CrownQuest Operating, based in Midland, Texas, in the mid-1990s. “I keep thinking that the capital is going to come back with the high prices, but it just seems like people are really hesitant to get back in,” he says.īillionaire oilman Tim Dunn also remains committed to fossil fuels. He says that the oil supply picture in the coming years “looks very bleak” and he expects it to lead to relatively high prices for the foreseeable future - which would be a financial boon to producers. Then president Donald Trump visited Double Eagle Energy in Midland, Texas, in July 2020 © Carlos Barria/ReutersĪs for the outlook now, Campbell says that the high oil prices seen this year - which he argues were exacerbated, but not caused, by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine - are a sign of things to come.Ĭompanies face difficulties raising funds to develop new oil and gas projects as banks and other investors shy away from the industry over climate concerns, argues Campbell.
“It’s been a wild ride, going from basically just a bootstrap operation, where we never knew from week to week whether we were going to make it, to doing multibillion-dollar transactions,” says Campbell. That came on the heels of a $2.8bn sale in the same area in 2017 to Parsley Energy, an oil and gas producer, itself later bought by Pioneer Resources. Most recently, in 2021, he and his partners, who now include private equity company Apollo Global Management, sold a business in the Permian basin in Texas, one of the world’s largest oilfields, to oil company Pioneer Natural Resources for $6.4bn. His breakthrough sale came in 2012, when he sold a cluster of oil and gas wells in Oklahoma for $250mn to the late wildcatter Aubrey McClendon, who co-founded and ran Chesapeake Energy, the large energy group. Those deals now total nearly $10bn, making Campbell one of the Texas oil patch’s most prolific dealmakers of recent years. Through his firm Double Eagle Energy, the company he jointly owns with Sellers, he has amassed a fortune over the past decade selling oil-producing operations to bigger players.
In fact, it worked out better than Campbell could have imagined.
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