Rick Perry Net Worth: Trump’s Pick For Energy Department Head Sat On Board Of Firm Behind Dakota Access Pipeline

The Senate began deciding Thursday morning whether former Texas Gov. James Richard “Rick” Perry was a suitable nominee to head the Department of Energy, which Perry previously said should be scrapped, after a brief and now infamous memory lapse.

Perry planned to walk back his 2011 dismissal of the agency at his Thursday hearing, but he still has good reason to take an adversarial stance toward both regulatory bodies. With an estimated net worth of $2 million but a long resume as a public servant, Perry has held various positions on the boards of oil and gas companies in his one-year break from political office, and, according to Forbes, has raked in $250,000 in consulting for a Caterpillar equipment seller and $100,000 in speaking fees.

According to Perry’s filled-out questionnaire for the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, which was questioning him Thursday, he has been quite busy since leaving the office of governor in 2015. He has sat on the board of Energy Transfer Partners, the Dallas-based propane and natural gas company behind the disputed Dakota Access pipeline, the energy investment firm Grey Rock Energy Partners, also based in Dallas and Delaware-based Sunoco Logistics Partners L. P., a subsidiary of the oil and gas giant Sunoco Inc., which itself is a subsidiary of Energy Transfer Partners.

Energy Transfer filed a motion to prevent the Army Corps of Engineers from studying the environmental impact of the Dakota pipeline On Tuesday. The filing came after the Corps in December barred the company from drilling under Lake Oahe, a major water source for the Sioux reservation at Standing Rock, where thousands have joined the Native Americans living there in protest.

According to a financial disclosure form sent to the Department of Energy’s ethics official, Perry resigned from the boards of Energy Transfer and Sunoco Logistics, along with positions an insurance firm, a stem cell bank and two consulting companies, as of Dec. 31. He also divested his interests in Grey Rock, Microsoft Corp., Tesla Motors Inc., Houston-based natural gas and oil pipeline company Enterprise Products Partners LLP, Texas-based WPP Investments LP and the Ohio-based Fairmount Santrol Inc., a producer of sand products used in oil and gas extraction.

Grey Rock, whose board he also resigned from, was co-founded by Perry's son, who remained its managing director. Just as Trump promised not to meddle in the Trump Organization while his sons manage it during his term, Perry wrote in the disclosure that he pledged to “not participate personally or substantially” in matters involving Grey Rock—“for at least one year” after the Dec. 31 resignation.