An early Bakken wildcatter, Hamm has said in company reports that the area will yield as much as 24 billion barrels of oil. He is worth $12.8 billion, according to the Bloomberg ranking.

North Dakota

“To put things in perspective, with current production at about 700,000 barrels a day, that is almost the size of Qatar’s oil production for the entire country,” said Christian O’Neill, Senior Energy Analyst with Bloomberg Industries in Princeton, New Jersey.

Petro-Hunt extracted 10.8 million barrels of oil and 17.9 billion cubic feet of natural gas last year across 6 states in the U.S., according to data compiled by Bloomberg from individual state production reports, including the assets it sold to Halcon.

The company was the fifth-largest natural gas and eighth largest oil producer in North Dakota in 2012, according to the North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources. It still owns 518,000 acres in the state, producing more than 5.1 million barrels of oil a year. Those fields are valued at about $1.9 billion, based on the terms of the Halcon deal. Hunt’s stake in Halcon is worth about $800 million.

Bigamist Father

Petro-Hunt’s energy assets outside North Dakota are valued at $875 million, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, applying the average price-to-cash flow multiple of 17 publicly traded peers to Hunt’s 2012 production of 1.8 million barrels of oil and 4.74 billion cubic feet of gas.

The company also has a financial stake in wells it does not operate, such as a minority interest in a series of wells operated by ConocoPhillips on the Alaska North Slope.

Hunt and his older brother, who goes by Bunker, are sons of Lyda Bunker and Haroldson Lafayette Hunt. Their father was a Texas oil tycoon and a bigamist, having three families at once. He split his fortune among the families prior to his death in 1974.

Herbert Hunt’s half-brother, Ray Lee Hunt, is majority owner and chairman of Hunt Consolidated Inc., a Dallas-based company that is the 10th-largest closely held oil producer in the U.S. Its Hunt Oil division has operations in Peru, Iraq and Yemen. He has a net worth of $8.6 billion, according to the Bloomberg ranking.