Quote:The Bush family has been in the energy business for decades, at least since 1950 when 26-year-old future president George H.W. Bush helped found the Bush-Overbey Oil Development Co. with financial support from his dad, U.S. Sen. Prescott Bush of Connecticut. President George W. Bush also worked in the oil and gas business, though he made his fortune with an investment in the Texas Rangers baseball team.

Similarly, fracking is not just a Jeb Bush investment, but also a Jeb Bush family affair.

Son George P. Bush, 38, was elected Texas land commissioner last year, two years after helping found Fort Worth-based FracStar Logistics, providing sand for fracking. One of FracStar's managing partners is Coral Gables-based De Soto Partners, which is co-owned by Jeb Bush and 31-year-old Jeb Bush Jr. FracStar has been renamed Proforce Energy Services.

Jeb Bush's private equity group, Britton Hill Holdings, was established in May 2013, but his entry into the fracking boom and private equity business wasn't publicly revealed until June 2014, when it triggered a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing for managing more than $100 million.

By then, Bush was looking increasingly like he would run for president.

The filing showed that the pooled investment fund had raised $40.4 million from 37 investors. Bush is chairman of Britton Hill, named after the highest point in Florida and based out of his office at the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables. His partners include former Lehman Brothers banker Amar Bajpai, former natural gas trader David Savett and private equity executive Ross Rodrigues. Bajpai is now on the board of Inflection Energy, the Denver company he and Bush invested in.

Bush and his partners "had more than five years consulting across various sectors, and a move into making direct investments was a natural extension," said Campbell, Bush's spokeswoman.

Bush's fracking investments are not the only time his private business life has overlapped with his public policy advocacy.

Quote:But pulling out of ventures in which he is a partner or owner, including his fracking investments, is far trickier because Bush's name and involvement presumably is part of what drew investors.

As Bloomberg reported last month, one offshore private equity fund on which Bush serves as chairman, BH Global Aviation, was raising tens of millions of dollars from foreign investors in September, even as Bush and his advisers were gearing up to surprise the political world by starting to raise millions of dollars for a likely presidential campaign.

Quote:At a political fundraiser in Colorado last spring, he scoffed at a proposed ballot initiative to give local governments more control over oil and gas drilling.

"The idea that in Colorado you would have a referendum to eliminate hydraulic fracking and horizontal drilling that creates wealth and prosperity, high-wage jobs for people in Colorado, is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard," Bush was quoted as saying.

Quote:The former governor already has resigned from various corporate boards, including Tenet Healthcare, which has a bottom-line interest in the success of Obamacare, and he ended consulting contracts as he moved fully into the presidential fray in December.