by For $5m, Louisiana’s flagship university will let an oil company weigh in on faculty research activities. Or, for $100,000, a corporation can participate in a research study, with “strong” review powers and access to all intellectual property as a result.
Those are the conditions outlined in a boilerplate document distributed by Louisiana State University’s fundraising arm to oil majors and chemical companies affiliated with the Louisiana Chemical Association, an industry lobby group, according to emails disclosed in response to a public records request from the Lens.
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Records show that after Shell granted LSU $25m in 2022 to create the Institute for Energy Innovation, the university gave the fossil fuel corporation license to influence research and coursework for the university’s new concentration in capture, carbon utilization and storage.
In turn, LSU’s fundraising entity, the LSU Foundation, used this partnership as a model to look around members of the Louisiana Chemical Society, such as ExxonMobil, Air Products and CF Industries, who have proposed carbon capture projects in Louisiana.
For $2m, Exxon became the institute’s first “partner-level strategic donor,” a position that came with a strong review of academic study output and the ability to focus research activities. Eight other companies have discussed similar deals with LSU, according to a partnership update LSU sent to Shell last summer.
Some students, academics and experts said such relationships raise questions about academic freedom and public trust.
Asked for comment, Institute for Energy Innovation director Brad Ives defended the partnerships, as did the oil majors. Two other companies have since partnered with the Energy Innovation Institute, Ives said. But Shell is the only company that has donated at the level that gave the company a seat on the advisory board that selects the institute’s research. The head of the Louisiana Chemical Society and the Mid-Louisiana Oil and Gas Association also sit on the advisory board, who can vote to stop a research project from moving forward.
Ives said being able to work with oil and gas companies is “really key to advancing energy innovation.”
A spokesperson for Shell said: “We are proud to partner with LSU to add to the growing body of peer-reviewed climate science and drive the effort to identify multiple pathways that could lead to more energy and less emissions.”
An ExxonMobil spokesperson said: “Our collaboration with LSU and the Institute for Energy Innovation includes an allocation for research into the use and storage of carbon capture, as well as advanced recycling studies.”
LSU has long been closely associated with oil majors, whose names hang from the university’s buildings and equipment. Almost 40% of LSU’s funding comes from the state, which received much of its revenue from oil and gas activities until the 1980s. In recent years, oil and gas revenues have been less than 10% of the state budget.
But the new, highly visible partnership with Shell went a step further, promising corporations voting power over the Institute for Energy Innovation’s research activities in return for their investment.
“I find it hard to see a faculty member engaged in legitimate research wanting an oil company or a representative of a chemical company to vote on his or her research agenda,” said Robert Mann, a political commentator and former journalism professor. LSU. “That is a terrible violation of academic freedom.
“You don’t expect to see it written down like that,” Mann said, after The Lens asked him to review the boilerplate document that outlines what companies can expect in return for their some donations to the LSU Energy Innovation Institute. It is not appropriate, Mann said, for faculty research to be directed by the decisions of the university dean, let alone a representative from outside the industry. “If you are a staff member in that unit you should know that the university is fine with auctioning off your academic freedom,” he said. “That’s what they’re doing.”
LSU’s Ives said his Institute for Energy Innovation is no different from similar institutions across the US, including the Texas Bureau of Economic Gology, which conducts research with the support of corporate donors. “I think researchers are saying that corporate funding for research damages the integrity of that research a little too much,” Ives said.
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Research conducted at the institute is subject to individual faculty ethics training and subject to peer review, he said. “A donor who has provided money to the institute will not be able to influence the outcome of that research in any way.”
Asked about the relationship with the institution and industry, Karsten Thompson, interim dean of the College of Engineering at LSU, said: “To me, it’s not a conflict at all. It is a partnership because they will be the ones making the biggest initial impacts on CO2 reduction2 emissions.”
Some observers, noting that fossil fuel companies have already shown a vested interest in hiding scientific conclusions, question the reliability of academic studies sponsored by fossil fuel companies. Exxon, for example, denied the threat of human-caused climate change for years, noted Jane Patton, an LSU alumna and U.S. fossil economy campaign manager for the Center for International Environmental Law.
After The Lens asked her to review LSU’s communications on the matter, Patton said she doubts fossil fuel companies have a say in what is and isn’t studied in risky efforts, such as carbon capture, which involves the chemical removal of carbon. dioxide from industrial emissions and pipe it underground. For her, the LSU documents basically proved her fear. “This is the first time I’ve seen real evidence of it,” Patton said. “This is a gross abuse of the public trust.”
To Patton, the perceived ambiguity of academic objectivity could not come at a worse time in Louisiana, because the climate crisis is making the state less habitable and housing more expensive. “It’s just an adverb,” she said. “To learn that the state’s flagship institution is allowing industry to determine the research agenda. No wonder it’s so hard to find peer-reviewed research on how bad this is.”
Records show that Shell helped tailor what LSU students learned in the six courses offered under the institute’s carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) concentration that emerged a few years ago. LSU alumus Lee Stockwell, Shell’s general manager of CCUS, sat on the search committee for the Energy Institute’s executive director, served on a petroleum engineering advisory board, and was instrumental in shaping the carbon capture curriculum.
Stockwell referred questions about Shell’s partnership with the university to LSU.
Stockwell was not the only oil representative who helped design the curriculum. BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil also had representatives on the ad hoc advisory committee that designed carbon capture coursework within the petroleum engineering department, according to a July 2022 email from Thompson. One cohort of students took at least two elective courses at LSU designed by the oil majors and another 10 students were expected to take the full concentration starting in 2022.
LSU is not alone in this practice, Thompson said. At most engineering departments in the country, there is an active Industrial Advisory Committee (IAC) determined on curricula, so that degrees change as technology changes, helping students land internships and jobs.
The LSU faculty is not as engaged with renewable energy companies, because oil and gas companies have the resources to address the climate crisis now — and are not dependent on future technology, Thompson said. “Renewable energy is much more abstract,” he said. “So I think that’s the difference. It’s not that we don’t care that much.”
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Fossil fuel companies have been coming into classrooms for decades, in part to help the industry maintain a positive public image in the face of a warming planet.
Some students do not approve of the university’s partnerships with, or any financial ties to, fossil fuel companies.
Over the past decade now, students across the country have filed complaints demanding divestment from fossil fuels and hundreds of institutions have united. Locally, the LSU Climate Pelicans, an interdisciplinary student group, called on the university to divest endowment funds from the fossil fuel industry.
Inspired by the Climate Pelicans’ work toward divestment, LSU graduate student Alicia Cerquone, who sits on the LSU student senate, sponsored a divestment solution. The measure passed in a 37-2 vote last year, according to LSU’s student newspaper. Although investment in fossil fuels represents only 2 to 3% of the endowment, it is an important philosophical step, Cerquone said.
Cerquone is also concerned about the influence of industry on the Institute for Energy Innovation and fears that other corporations could control the curriculum of other departments. “These entities will have a say in what we pay to learn here,” she said.
The fossil fuel industry has defeated academia outside of Louisiana. ExxonMobil and Shell helped fund a similar Energy Initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where top donors can have an office on the MIT campus, according to Inside Climate News. In 2021, Exxon funded and co-authored a research paper with MIT researchers with conclusions that supported the argument for federal subsidies for carbon capture and use.
