Neat and messy, conservative and spendthrift, no we’re not talking about Felix and Oscar, but former ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond and former Chesapeake Chairman and CEO Aubrey McClendon, who have teamed up to run a shale gas venture focused on Ohio’s Utica Shale.

“It may be the U.S. energy industry’s oddest couple: Lee Raymond, who was famously tightfisted as chief executive of Exxon Mobil Corp., now has a seat at the table in a venture headed by Aubrey McClendon, whose aggressive spending hastened his exit as chairman at Chesapeake Energy Corp.,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

McClendon had a reputation for bleeding shareholder cash and owning ethically-questionable personal stakes in the company’s wells when he ran Chesapeake Energy, while Raymond guided Exxon through its merger with Mobil and championed Return on Average Capital Employed (ROACE) as one of the most important oil company valuation metrics.

The idea appears to be that Raymond brings legitimacy and financial discipline to American Energy Ohio Holdings LLC, which has raised about $1.3 billion for McClendon’s new company American Energy Partners LP.