Haslam Family: Leveraging UT-Knoxville Ties for Fracking Profits

From:  DeSmogBlog

Gov. Haslam, the former Mayor of Knoxville, took $398,110 from the oil and gas industry before his Nov. 2010 gubernatorial race victory.

The Haslam family is an oil and gas family through and through, standing to profit immensely from a fracking boom in Tennessee and nationwide. 

In 2012, the Haslam family - owners of Pilot Flying J truck fueling stations, a corporation where Bill Haslem used to serve as president - purchased Western Petroleum and Maxum Petroleum. Both Western and Maxum are major suppliers of fuel and lubricants for fracking operations. Pilot Flying J is the nation's No. 1 retailer of diesel fuel and is the 6th most profitable corporation in the U.S., earning over $29 billion in 2012.

Bill, Jimmy and Jim Haslam stand in front of a Pilot Gas pump in 1977 (Photo Credit: Pilot Corporation)

Pilot Flying J also has 63 of its stations nationwide retrofitted with natural gas pumpsfor 18-wheelers owned by T. Boone Pickens' Clean Energy Fuels Corporation (CEF) as part of CEF's "America's Natural Gas Highway." Some perspective: CEF currently has67 U.S. fueling stations in total.  

By the end of 2013 - an article in EcoWatch explains - Pilot Flying J "plan[s] to have 100 truck stops capable of fueling 18-wheelers with...natural gas."

Pilot also owns Marathon Petroleum, which it purchased as a wholly-owned subsidiary in Sept. 2008. Marathon owns the Wellsville, Ohio Intermodal Facility, "a terminal capable of loading up to 50,000 [barrels of fracked oil per day via the Utica Shale] onto barges on the Ohio River," according to the Youngstown Business Journal. 

Bill Haslam's father, Jim Haslem - a co-chair of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's Tennessee campaign and former member of the UT-Knoxville Board of Trustees - gave a $32.5 million donation to UT-Knoxville in 2006. It was the largest ever private donation to the university from an individual. 

“If Tennessee is going to be a leader in the knowledge economy of the 21st century, it must have a great flagship university,” Jim Haslam said in a press release at the time. “We cannot go from good to great without increasing fundraising, and my hope would be that this gift would put the spotlight on philanthropy and the University of Tennessee’s tremendous potential to become a great university.”

Bill's brother Jimmy was the college roommate and one of the "best friends" of climate change "skeptic," U.S. Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) while attending UT-Knoxville, also serving as Corker's chief fundraiser during his successful 2006 run for the U.S. Senate. Jimmy is also the owner of the Cleveland Browns, which he bought for $1 billion in 2012.   

The Haslam family is set to cash in on the arrangement, coinciding - perhaps not coincidentially - with ongoing UT System budget cuts. After all, the cuts doled out by Haslam serve as the rationale for the necessity of new revenue streams like fracking on UT-Knoxville's portion of the Cumberland Forest. A business opportunity, if you will.