Rick Santorum's Big Coal Buddies

The "local" company Santorum brags about helping was a coal mining giant that gave him tens of thousands of dollars during and after his time in Congress.

Rick Santorum likes to brag about how he helped a poor local company fight big, bad government regulations on greenhouse gas emissions. "My grandfather was a coal miner," Santorum said at a debate in New Hampshire this week. "So I contacted a local coal company from my area. I said, look, I want to join you in that fight. I want to work together with you."

But Consol Energy, the company for which Santorum was a "consultant," wasn't some bare-bones local outfit—it's one of the largest coal mining companies in the United States, and its largest shareholder is the German utility RWE. And Santorum wasn't doing volunteer work: He was paid quite handsomely for his services, to the tune of $142,500 from 2010 to August 2011. He only ended his role with Consol when he launched his presidential bid last spring.

Santorum's relationship with the coal company began long before his consulting gig; Santorum and Consol had a mutually profitable association during Santorum's tenure in the Senate, too. Consol donated more than $73,800 to Santorum during his time as a legislator while simultaneously spending more than $1 million lobbying Congress on pollution limits, mine reclamation, worker health benefits, and tax policy, according to lobbying disclosure forms filed with the US Senate Office of Public Records.

In the most recent congressional debate over a climate bill—the one for which Santorum "volunteered" his services—Consol spent $10.24 million on lobbying, a major increase over its lobbying expenditures in previous years. Much of that money was spent to defeat legislationto cap greenhouse gas emissions.

Greenhouse gas regulation wasn't the only area where Santorum's legislative agenda mirrored Consol's top lobbying priorities. In 2006, Santorum authored a provision for a tax bill that would have created a tax credit for "synfuel," which included coal bed methane, as Greenwirereported at the time. Synthfuel is made by drilling into coal seams to extract methane, a form of natural gas, and Consol is a "leading producer" of the product.

Another priority for Consol was passing the 2005 Energy Policy Act, a bill criticized for its numerous handouts to the coal, oil, and gas industries. Santorum voted for the bill and was an enthusiastic supporter. He was particularly fond of the millions of dollars the bill allotted for so-called "clean coal" technology—another major priority for Consol's lobbyists. Read More