Campaign finance watchdog: Texas fracking billionaires gave $51k to Montana GOP candidates in 2012

According to a report by the non-partisan campaign finance watchdog group National Institute for Money in State Politics, Texas fracking billionaire brothers Dan and Farris Wilks and their spouses gave  a collective total of $51,040 to more than 70 GOP legislative candidates in 2012. According to the report, in most instances they gave the maximum amount.

You can see the contributions from Dan, Staci, Dan and Staci, Farris, JoAnn, and Farris and JoAnn at FollowTheMoney.org.

“Sixty-four of the candidates they supported won; 63 are now legislators, and Tim Fox is the attorney general. Across both chambers, 70 percent of Republican legislators and 42 percent of the legislative body as a whole received contributions from the Wilkses during the 2012 election.”

You can read the full report here.

It’s worth a read.

The Follow The Money report draws attention to Dec. 13, 2012 Billings Gazette article detailing how the Wilks brothers are buying up huge tracts of land in eastern Montana:

“Near where the borders of Fergus, Musselshell and Golden Valley counties meet south of the Little Snowy Mountains, two billionaire Texas brothers have quietly collected more than 177,000 acres of ranch land in the last two years.”

According to Gazette reporter Brett French, the Wilks brothers own at least 276,000 acres in seven counties in eastern Montana.

According to Forbes, the Wilks brothers are worth an estimated $1.4 billion each. The Wilks brothers started out running a family masonry business in Texas and Oklahoma before venturing into hydraulic fracturing in and oil field serves in 2002.

According to Follow The Money some people are are concerned the Wilks brothers are amassing land to frack.

Regulation of fracking is largely left to the states; the EPA has limited authority to regulate the industry. Consequently, state lawmakers and officials determine the regulations and permitting requirements for drillers.

"We really can't say we're the Saudi Arabia of coal anymore."

That’s the message from Brenda Pierce, head of the U.S. Geological Survey team that found that the U.S. coal reserves are probably about half of what they were previously thought to be.

Gov. Brian Schweitzer likes to use that phrase when talking about Montana's vast coal reserves, such as in this 2007 Time magazine piece:

"Now here's how Montana is going to save the world," [Schweitzer] proclaimed at one point. "We are the Saudi Arabia of coal," he said...

But is that characterization of Montana's--and the nation's--coal reserves accurate? Not according to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal (you have to be a subscriber to read the full article).

Basically, here’s the gist:

George Warholic calculates America's vast coal reserves the same way his predecessors have for decades: He looks up the prior year's coal-reserve estimate, subtracts the year's nationwide production and arrives at a new official tally.

Coal provides nearly one-quarter of the total energy consumed in the U.S., and by Mr. Warholic's estimate, the country has enough in the ground to last about 240 years. A belief in this nearly boundless supply has led officials to dub the U.S. the "Saudi Arabia of Coal."

But the estimate, recent findings show, may be wildly overconfident.

While there is almost certainly as much coal in the ground as Mr. Warholic's Energy Information Administration believes, relatively little of it can be profitably extracted. Last year, the U.S. Geological Survey completed an extensive analysis of Wyoming's Gillette coal field, the nation's largest and most productive, and determined that less than 6% of the coal in its biggest beds could be mined profitably, even at prices higher than today's.

"We really can't say we're the Saudi Arabia of coal anymore," says Brenda Pierce, head of the USGS team that conducted the study.

According to scientists, carbon dioxide emitted from coal-fired power plants is the leading contributor to global climate change. (A sobering note on that point: A new study by the USGS found Antarctica’s ice shelves are disappearing faster than previously thought.) That’s why lawmakers in Washington are busy working on new federal carbon legislation. Congress is likely to pass cap and trade legislation in the next year or so, and that in turn is likely to increase the cost of coal production and consumption even more.

Coal’s future seems to be getting darker by the day.

On the upside, as coal becomes more expensive to burn, Montana could end up faring better than other coal-producing states because we have another abundant source of energy in Big Sky Country: wind.

According to National Wind, “America's leading large-scale community wind project developer,” over two thirds of Montana has excellent wind resources for the development of utility scale wind projects.

Perhaps in the future Montana will be dubbed "the Saudi Arabia of wind."Oooh....I should trademark that. Shoot. It looks like T. Boone Pickens already beat me to the punch.