Last year was a tough year for the upstream sector to be sure. Oil and gas executives had to draw on their deepest strengths and creativity in order to manage through this downcycle. Even so, there were success stories that stood out that we think should be recognized.

This year’s winners of the 13th annual Oil and Gas Investor Excellence Awards are being honored for their achievements in 2015. They represent the spectrum of upstream activities, ranging from the CEO of a large and well-established public company active in several core areas, to a newly formed E&P that made three deals with Chinese private equity backing, to an E&P company making a significant acquisition into a new core. These winners operate primarily in the Permian Basin and Bakken Shale.

—The Editors

First, we’re pleased to honor Harold Hamm as Executive of the Year. The chairman and CEO of Continental Resources Inc. led a team that through horizontal drilling and fracking vaulted North Dakota to the heights of success. From the earliest stages, Hamm insisted the Bakken and Three Forks plays in North Dakota would be world-class, holding billions more barrels of oil reserves than was first believed by industry, government or consultants. This has turned out to be true in spades. The horizontal renaissance in the basin was led by companies such as Continental.

In addition, the company has opened up Oklahoma’s Scoop and Stack plays, today some of the most economic places to drill in a low-price environment. Indeed, last year we recognized Continental’s geology team for discovering these plays.

But we are also recognizing Hamm for his lifetime of industry advocacy, a role he has enthusiastically played since the late-1990s, when he formed Save Domestic Oil to protest oil imports and support the domestic oilman (this was ­before the shale revolution).

Today he is well-known as one of the most vocal leaders of the industry’s efforts to overturn the ban on crude oil exports, a vigorous campaign that drew a lot of ­attention from the public. It ended in success in late-2015 with the first U.S. oil exports shipped out soon thereafter, a game-changer after 40 years.

To support exports, Hamm held hundreds of meetings on Capitol Hill and made frequent appearances on cable TV and other media outlets to explain why the U.S. can and should export crude, and its many benefits: job creation, GDP growth and energy security.

The U.S. doubled its oil production in the last five years and Hamm thinks we can do it again if commodity prices improve.

Blue Whale North America receives our Financing of the Year award for bringing $1.4 billion to the Permian Basin in two acquisitions involving three private E&P sellers. These deals were done on behalf of Yantai ­Xinchao Industry Co. Ltd., of Shanghai, with private ­equity from a Beijing-based company interested in North American energy investments, Phoenix Tree Capital.

Blue Whale will identify further opportunities for these Chinese investors. See our interview with Blue Whale CEO Curtis Newstrom in the February 2016 issue for a detailed discussion on how and why this deal unfolded. He formed Blue Whale in 2014, and did the Permian deal in November 2015.

Our M&A Deal of the Year goes to WPX Energy Inc. and RKI Exploration & Production LLC for WPX’s $2.75 billion, accretive acquisition of the Permian Basin assets of privately held RKI. This deal transformed ­formerly gas-weighted WPX’s portfolio, as its oil ­production will rise to 36% of its volumes by 2017. ­Included in the package were 3,600 Delaware Basin gross, risked drilling locations across several stacked-pay­ intervals. Total net resource potential is estimated at more than 1 billion barrels of oil equivalent on the acquired assets.

This deal gave WPX the scale it had been seeking in an oil play, yielding decades of development in a new core area.

For RKI the deal was the reward for successfully ­developing a core position that was attractive to a larger company.

We congratulate these winners for their standout ­performance and wish them well in the months ahead.