Dunham's new drill at Chesapeake At the age of 73, Archie Dunham is taking on one of the toughest jobs anywhere in the energy business: keeping watch over Aubrey McClendon. Mr Dunham, announced on Thursday as the new chairman at Chesapeake Energy, has an eminent reputation in the industry, but nothing in his long career has presented him with an equivalent challenge. Under Mr McClendon, its dynamic co-founder, chief executive and now ex-chairman, Chesapeake has built up the industry's best portfolio of onshore US oil and gasfields, but also large debts and off-balance sheet liabilities. Mr Dunham's job will be to make the best use of Mr McClendon's talents, as the company shifts its focus from acquiring new drilling rights in promising areas to producing oil and gas on leases that it owns already. He must also pick through the complexities of Chesapeake's financial structure to decide on the best option for maximising shareholder value, which could mean accepting a takeover bid. None of that will be easy. Although Mr McClendon is relinquishing the chairmanship, he will remain a powerful presence at the company. No one knows the business he started 23 years ago better than he does, and he still has a personal 2.5 per cent stake in many of the company's wells. Under a recent change in the company's rules, he will retain the right to call board meetings and special meetings of shareholders. Mr Dunham does not look like the man to break that grip. That is not because he is a shrinking violet. People who know him say he is a strong enough personality to stand up to Mr McClendon. Having grown up and taken his first degree and MBA in Oklahoma, the home state of Chesapeake and Mr McClendon, he moved away and became a prominent figure in the business establishment in Houston. He is politically well connected, having served on two advisory commissions for president George W. Bush, and was president of both the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute, two of the country's most influential industry lobby groups. In its statement after his appointment, he said he was "attracted by the clear mandate to provide strong oversight" over the company. However, he has no record of coming in to sort out troubled companies such as Chesapeake. He was a long-serving executive with Conoco and its then parent Du Pont, the chemicals group. He joined Conoco in 1966, eventually rising to become chief executive in 1996, and led its spin-off from Du Pont in 1998. He has never held a senior executive role at another company, although he has had several non-executive directorships, including at the Union Pacific railway company, where he is still on the board. There is one respect, though, in which his prior experience could prove highly relevant. The defining moment of Mr Dunham's career came in 2001, when he agreed a $35bn merger for Conoco with Phillips, another US oil group. His role in that deal was criticised, both at the time and subsequently, on the grounds that he should have squeezed out more value for Conoco's investors. Phillips shareholders took 57 per cent of the merged company, where Mr Dunham became chairman while Jim Mulva of Phillips became chief executive. Some analysts say the possibility that there was "money left on the table" in that deal suggests Mr Dunham lacks the hard bargaining skills needed to secure the best possible outcome for Chesapeake's investors. However, Amy Myers Jaffe of Rice university in Houston points out that Conoco shareholders who hung on to their equity in the merged company did well out of it. ConocoPhillips" stock went on an excellent run, comfortably outperforming its larger rival ExxonMobil, up until the collapse of oil and gas prices in the second half of 2008. While the merger may not have delivered much of an immediate pay-off to shareholders, it created a stronger company that prospered for most of the decade. Having retired as chairman of ConocoPhillips back in 2004, Mr Dunham faded from view, but he is now squarely back in the spotlight. If he can secure for Chesapeake's battered investors as good an outcome as he delivered for Conoco's, his return to the ring to fight again will have been well worth it.