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Aubrey McClendon, Restless and Reckless Wildcatter, Was Deal-Making to the End

Aubrey McClendon in 2012. The oil and gas entrepreneur died in a car crash on Wednesday.Credit...Sean Gardner/Reuters

HOUSTON — In the days leading up to Aubrey McClendon’s death in a car crash on Wednesday, the pressure on him had become unrelenting.

He knew only too well, friends said, that he was facing federal bid-rigging charges over oil and gas leases; the indictment came on Tuesday. And like other executives in the industry, he was coming under severe financial stress because of the plunge in commodity prices.

But virtually to the end, Mr. McClendon, the pioneering wildcatter, was weaving and bobbing like a boxer trying to win a fight he was losing, seeking to spread globally the shale boom that he had helped pioneer in the United States.

Even while scaling back investments in the United States to stay afloat, the private company he founded after he was forced out of Chesapeake Energy three years ago was making deals from Australia to Mexico.

As recently as January, Mr. McClendon moved to take advantage of a new political wave in Argentina favoring foreign investment to enter into a joint venture with the national oil company there to develop a shale field in Patagonia. He was not only doubling down in a challenging place at a time of low oil and gas prices, but doing so in a country where usually only oil giants like Exxon Mobil and Chevron had previously dared to invest.

To the end, Mr. McClendon was a risk taker, a man who friends said typically talked on his phone while driving because he was always in a rush to do several tasks at once. He often neglected to use his seatbelt, his friends said, which was the case Wednesday morning when he died after crashing into a bridge at high speed in Oklahoma City.

His indictment on Tuesday on charges of conspiring with two unnamed companies, believed to be Chesapeake Energy and SandRidge Energy, to fix prices of leases in Oklahoma came as a surprise to the oil world, but friends say Mr. McClendon had known it was coming a few days before the announcement.

The case had been building for years, after Reuters, the news agency, revealed in 2012 that Chesapeake had discussed with another company how to suppress land lease prices in Michigan. Last year, Chesapeake settled that case, paying $25 million as compensation to landowners with leases.

Mr. McClendon was nothing if not restless and reckless. While on an acquisition spree at Chesapeake, he intertwined his personal financial well-being with that of the company, taking a personal stake in its wells and then using those investments as collateral for up to $1.1 billion in loans to himself.

“Aubrey always believed that he could change the future,” said Tom Price, a former Chesapeake senior vice president and a friend of Mr. McClendon’s, who said he continued making deals even when he knew the Justice Department was investigating him. “He was a guy who was always willing to charge the hill. He believed in himself so thoroughly.”

Almost immediately after the activist investor Carl C. Icahn and the Chesapeake board forced him in 2013 to leave the company he had been a co-founder of 24 years before, he started another company, American Energy Partners, focusing on developing oil and natural gas fields in Ohio, West Virginia, Oklahoma and Texas.

Oil prices were high in 2013 and 2014 as Mr. McClendon tried for a second act of his acquisition frenzy, which was one of the highlights of the national shale boom since 2005. And while natural gas prices were low, there was the prospect that improving production efficiencies and the demise of coal burning would help start a comeback for gas.

But gas prices kept falling, and over the last 20 months oil prices collapsed as well, by roughly 70 percent, forcing scores of drilling companies into bankruptcy.

While others decommissioned their rigs and sold off properties, Mr. McClendon continued to do what he had done at Chesapeake: pare back some efforts even as he expanded others to position himself for the next market shift.

Taking a page from his old playbook, Mr. McClendon tried to stay afloat by putting up his own assets, from homes to vintage wines to his part ownership of the Oklahoma City Thunder basketball team, as collateral.

One affiliate of American Energy Partners that tried to raise $2 billion in an initial public offering in November came up with only $11.2 million. The effort was then canceled.

Just a few days ago, American Energy Partners confirmed to The Oklahoman newspaper that it planned to spin off two subsidiaries that were developing fields in the Permian Basin of West Texas and New Mexico and the Woodford shale field in Oklahoma.

Requests for comment from American Energy were not answered, and Mr. McClendon’s lawyers declined to comment.

One of American Energy Partners’ lead investors, the Texas-based private equity firm Energy and Minerals Group, refused to invest in some of Mr. McClendon’s recent projects and eventually cut ties with his firm.

Still, Mr. McClendon carried on by making new exploration agreements with service companies to drill in Oklahoma and with multiple efforts abroad. And associates said his workaholic ways continued at a breathtaking pace.

“You can’t do as much as Aubrey did trouble-free,” said T. Boone Pickens, the prominent oil executive who knew Mr. McClendon for 25 years. “As fast as he was moving, you are going to have some problems. He went by Mexico for a minute, and then headed for Argentina.”

Last fall, Mr. McClendon decided to take advantage of a new constitutional reform in Mexico that encouraged foreign investment in oil exploration and production. So far auctions for drilling rights there have shown mixed results as oil companies have cut back on investing, but Mr. McClendon was not deterred.

By partnering with a Mexico City private equity fund led by the former President Vicente Fox, Mr. McClendon offered his experience exploring the Eagle Ford shale field in southern Texas, whose extension into northern Mexico remains largely unexplored.

At the same time, Mr. McClendon was doing business in Australia, a giant natural gas producer and exporter; he announced four deals involving more than 50 million acres of petroleum fields only days after the Mexico deal was executed. Again, he showed a penchant for going where others did not dare; months earlier, Chevron and ConocoPhillips had abandoned lackluster exploration efforts in Australia.

“It fit his personality,” said Philip H. Weiss, chief investment analyst at Baltimore Washington Financial Advisors, who has followed Mr. McClendon’s career for years. “For all the issues of how he did things, few could match his willingness to take risk and go to new places.”

The biggest deal, at least potentially, was his new $447 million venture with YPF, the national oil company in Argentina, to explore the Vaca Muerta, or Dead Cow, shale field.

Argentina has long been a challenge for foreign investors, but the Vaca Muerta is potentially the most productive shale field outside the United States. A new government is seeking foreign investment after more than a decade of populist rule.

Many companies have given up exploration in shale fields globally because of cost, political risk and the geological complexity of shale fields in places like Eastern Europe and China.

But Mr. McClendon frequently said that shale could be an energy game changer internationally, as it has been in the United States in recent years, converting the country from an energy importer to exporter.

“We decided over a year ago that we should take the expertise we’ve developed to those countries around the world where the shale code hasn’t been cracked yet,” Mr. McClendon told The Oklahoman after striking the deal in Argentina. “We think we have a high level of technical expertise and the ability to watch costs and be the prime mover in combining this world-class technology with world-class cost control.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Hard-Charging Wildcatter Was Making Global Deals Until the End. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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