During the 2024 campaign, Trump met with leaders of the oil and gas industry and asked them to raise $1 billion for his campaign. He promised to be their champion.

I don’t know whether the industry delivered for Trump, but he has certainly delivered for them. He has opposed alternative sources of energy, treats climate change as a hoax, and canceled federal contracts for wind and solar projects that were well underway. He loves fossil fuels and plans to revive the coal industry. Trump is a champion of “clean coal,” whatever that is.

While Europe, China, and Japan forge ahead with the expansion of alternative sources of energy, the U.S. is investing in the energy sources of the past.

Redeeming his promise to the coal industry, Trump recently launched planning for a coal-fired power plant in West Virginia. The contract for the design and feasibility was awarded to a Trump crony with no experience in the field.

A man the Trump administration picked to be a key player at the fore of a U.S. coal renaissance is likely more familiar to QAnon circles than energy ones.

TerraSpark’s project carries big promises. The proposed 1.6 gigawatt facility — touted by the Trump administration last week — would be the first new coal-fired power plant built in the U.S since 2013. It vows to infuse up to 1,000 jobs into West Virginia, a state rich in coal-mining history that’s seen its industry wither over the past two decades.

But few if any Trump administration energy allies have heard of TerraSpark or Alex Phillips, who is running the company with two other people also lacking coal backgrounds. Even the Republican lawmaker whose district would host the massive coal plant and carbon capture project learned of it just two months before the Energy Department this month agreed to give it $18.5 million of taxpayer dollars to pay for a feasibility and design study.

While Phillips has no energy industry experience, he has hovered around Washington politics during the Trump era. The owner of a rural Virginia internet business served on telecommunications advisory boards. He was past president of a wireless internet company trade association that also had a political action committee. And he operated his own PAC, the Great American Patriot Project, that backed candidates who “adhere to the United States Constitution and America First principles.”

He made more of a name for himself within the MAGA movement through his American Priority Conference, known as AMPfest. It drew QAnon promoters and personalities like Roger Stone — President Donald Trump is a longtime friend and former client — former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn and other MAGA influencers with a history of touting conspiracy theories, particularly the lie that widespread voter fraud cost Trump the 2020 election.

AMPfest and Phillips’ American Priority organization have since closed shop, with the last AMPfest held in October 2021 at Trump National Doral in Miami. Before then, however, he became integral enough to MAGA world to secure a speaking spot alongside far-right provocateurs like Alex Jones, Scott Pressler and Jack Posobiec at a rally on the eve of Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021 “Save America” event.

While Phillips did not end up speaking at that event — according to Mother Jones, which did not report why — he embraced election denier theories from the scene. He also encouraged then-Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify the 2020 election, saying he “needs to step up.”

“I think that there’s been overwhelming evidence provided in so many different formats, ways, that any congressman or senator that doesn’t think that there was some kind of irregularity that needs to be looked at in these seven states is just not paying attention or is corrupt,” he told Citizen Media News outside of the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Phillips referred questions to a public relations firm, which made another TerraSpark partner, Bill Tolpegin, available for comment. Tolpegin said in a statement that Phillips had no contact with the White House or Energy Department about the grant. Tolpegin said that the company “had no special, unique or otherwise different levels of access, communication with or attention from administration officials.”

But Phillips’ latest career act is nonetheless illustrative of Washington politics during Trump’s White House sequel, where allies have often won contracts or jobs.

“This is not normal,” Mike McKenna, an energy lobbyist who worked in the first Trump White House, said of DOE approving federal grants for a company with no track record in the industry.

McKenna said he is aware of two companies “with decades of experience in generating electricity” that have struggled to navigate DOE processes.

“These companies are no doubt going to ask if companies and people with no experience can do this, why can’t we?” he said. “I don’t want to be that guy, but this is obviously political. And the more political it is, the less likely it is to happen,” he said of building new coal plants.

White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement that Trump’s coal grants are part of his commitments to buoy the nation’s coal industry, such as directives to run coal plants beyond scheduled retirement dates that DOE has credited for preventing electricity blackouts.

“The media’s continued attempts to fabricate conflicts of interest are irresponsible and reinforce the public’s distrust in what they read,” she wrote in response to questions about Phillips and TerraSpark.

Rogers referred POLITICO to DOE for questions about the grant process. DOE spokesperson Ben Dietderich said the department selected TerraSpark through a “competitive merit review process” that included evaluation of “technical merit, programmatic relevance, and the applicant’s ability to successfully execute the proposed work.” He did not address questions about Phillips.

“The economics of the project will speak for itself, and are highly competitive,” Tolpegin said.

Coal and carbon capture

What TerraSpark envisions is complex and expensive. A power plant the size it foresees would likely cost more than $1 billion — and that’s before accounting for technology to capture carbon dioxide emissions as proposed.

In addition to Phillips and Tolpegin, who calls himself a “serial entrepreneur,” the company has a third partner, Cory Cipra, a Kansas City-based technology consultant whom Tolpegin said has “a deep background working with utilities.” The company applied for the DOE grant in December and said it will not receive the funding until it comes up with the remaining $21.5 million needed to fund its study.

In an interview with POLITICO, Tolpegin said he founded the company with Phillips to bring online more energy generation “in a way that’s as clean as possible” that could eventually be “carbon negative.”

He called the company’s lack of experience in coal a “good thing.” Prior carbon capture attempts have been limited by “conventional” carbon capture technologies, he said.

“We’re not building your grandparents’ coal plant,” Tolpegin said. “We’re going to be building something new that I hope can flip the script on coal.”

The project was not on DOE’s radar a year ago, said Steve Winberg, who ran DOE’s fossil energy office in Trump’s first term and was undersecretary of infrastructure at DOE until May 2025. He said he knew some of the people involved in TerraSpark — he would not say who — but not Phillips.

The pool of potential grant winners was much larger earlier this winter. DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, which handles power generation and coal research, briefed the agency front office in early March on at least seven viable selections for the federal money, according to three people familiar with the process, who were granted anonymity to discuss internal government deliberations.

DOE ultimately picked two proposals for new coal plants, including a project in Alaska — which was awarded an $89 million grant — and the TerraSpark plan to build in West Virginia. Another two projects for existing plants also received awards. 

“Some of these companies are probably three connected guys who threw an application together,” said one DOE official granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with reporters. They said the TerraSpark proposal deserves scrutiny. “And the DOE review that occurred would likely not surface that and/or was specifically disinterested in figuring that out.”

TerraSpark does not have much of an online presence, registering its website in July 2025, according to a domain registry. Its website did not name any company officials until a press release for the DOE grant appeared late June 4.…

Kevin Hagerty, a commissioner of Grant County, where the project is slated to be located, said there had been rumors of a project but that he didn’t learn of specifics until DOE announced the grant. Nonetheless, he said people in the Trump-backing county were excited about the support for the state’s shrinking coal industry.

The project is in early stages. While TerraSpark said the project will be located in Mount Storm, it has not yet selected a location, and does not own land in the county.

The partners are also still exploring what specific end users, such as a data center, will be attached to the project.

On June 4, the day DOE announced its grant, TerraSpark’s website said the coal plant would be accompanied by a 1-gigawatt AI data center. By the next day, the website instead said the plan would be paired with a “multi-industry campus.”

Tolpegin said some details on the website were updated to correct “stale” information and that the “first phase” of the project would be building the coal plant in the next few years, with tenants to be determined later. The company has also said it eventually plans to connect the plant to the grid.

Uphill battle for new coal

Energy companies and utilities have been reluctant to build new coal-fired power plants in the U.S. for myriad reasons. Environmental regulations raised the cost of burning coal. A gusher of natural gas made that fuel more economically competitive. Plummeting solar and wind costs pushed more capital-intensive coal facilities out of the mix.

Yet tech companies have proven willing to explore costly energy projects like geothermal and nuclear to feed energy-hungry data centers. Trump, meanwhile, has pledged to revive “clean, beautiful coal.” Some coal backers are quietly optimistic that those trends will benefit them.

“You think about the speed to which you need to get a data center going, people assume it’s going to be natural gas, but then you’ve got that turbine problem — long lead time on those,” Winberg said. “A lot of people assume it’s going to be nuclear, but you’ve got a long, long lead time on the nuclear. So coal is starting to fit into the mix again.”

But analysts in the energy sector have been skeptical of the TerraSpark project’s viability.

Seth Feaster, an energy data analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a think tank that supports a shift to cleaner resources, said that while many large energy infrastructure projects are built by experienced energy utilities, DOE in its June grant announcement turned to companies that don’t appear to have deep pockets or relevant experience.

“Who’s financing them, who’s going to invest in them?” he said. The government grants will “help a little bit, but you’ve got to convince the markets of the credibility of your project.”

“I find that pretty thin at the moment here,” he said.

Ryan Sweezey, director of North American power and renewables at the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie, said that if the developers plan to have a data center or other industrial customers that directly tie in to the plant, coal boilers likely won’t be able to ramp up and down quickly enough without batteries.

Sweezey said the executives’ lack of experience in energy or coal plant development was a “major red flag.”

Hooking up AI data centers directly to power sources — an increasingly popular model for the electricity-devouring sector — is “very complicated” and requires “serious expertise,” said Sweezey.

Adding a carbon capture and storage system to the mix further complicates that picture, and would catapult the overall cost, which could be over $10 billion, he predicted. Tolpegin said the entire cost of the energy campus and coal plant could be “in the billions.”

TerraSpark has partnered with Mantel, a carbon capture startup founded by MIT alumni in 2022, and Sargent & Lundy, an energy engineering firm. The Chicago-based firm has built more than 100 projects related to carbon capture in the last five years, according to its website, and completed work on the Petra Nova project in Texas, the only U.S. power plant currently operating carbon capture at commercial scale.

In a statement, a Mantel spokesperson said TerraSpark is one of many customers and that it is “committed to delivering efficient, scalable carbon capture solutions wherever they can have the greatest impact.”

The energy technology service provider Babcock & Wilcox is also part of the project, along with carbon capture consultants Advanced Resources International.

In a statement, Babcock’s communications director, Sharyn Brooks, said the company has decades of experience with boiler technologies, which positions the company “to support advanced coal generation projects with proven, high-efficiency technologies.”

“Our role is focused on providing engineering and technical support,” Brooks said.

Representatives of Sargent & Lundy and Advanced Resources International did not respond to requests for comment.

Terraspark’s ambitious plans also call for building a new campus for West Virginia University to focus on extracting rare earth minerals from coal waste, and could eventually acquire coal ash from other locations to process for rare earths.

That would be a massive undertaking for any developer, said Rudra Kapila, a director of carbon management and hydrogen at think tank Third Way, who evaluated carbon capture grant proposals for DOE during the Biden administration.

“I mean, who is this Johnny?” she said.

Ben Lefebvre contributed to this report.