Last week, Missouri governor Mike Kehoe signed into law a bill that packaged together dozens of reforms to utility regulations. Among them was a provision called “construction work in progress,” or CWIP, which allows power companies to bill their customers for the costs of building power plants during their construction phase, rather than after they are completed and generating electricity. The law repeals an earlier ban on CWIP passed via a ballot referendum that Missouri voters, concerned about the then-mounting costs of nuclear plants, initiated in 1976.

In states with traditional, vertically integrated energy markets, the utility companies that distribute electricity to homes and businesses also build the power plants that supply them. Their profit models are based on collecting a return on their capital investments at a fixed rate set by state commissions, paid for through customers’ electricity bills. 

Where CWIP comes in is in answering the question of when this money should be collected: during construction, or only after the project is “used and useful.”

Missouri’s new law appears to be part of a wave of similar policies passed or introduced in several state legislatures. Last month, the neighboring state of Arkansas passed a law that included a CWIP policy. Last year, Mississippi’s legislature passed a law that included CWIP-like provisions (though it didn’t use that name for the policy). Another law passed last year in Kansas allowed CWIP cost recovery for gas plants. And a bill currently moving through the North Carolina legislature expands the use of CWIP for new nuclear and natural gas plants.

The Missouri bill’s sponsors, Senator Mike Cierpiot and Representative Josh Hurlbert, justified the CWIP provisions in interviews with The Beacon, a Kansas City nonprofit outlet, on the basis that it didn’t apply to nuclear plants, but only to gas generation — and therefore would be less risky. Hurlbert said CWIP “is not going to be used on anything nuclear like we’ve seen with some projects in Georgia and South Carolina,” even though the language of the bill leaves room for the possibility of a nuclear plant being financed by CWIP under certain conditions.

Cierpiot told The Beacon that a clawback provision in the bill, under which cancellation of a plant forces the companies to pay back customers with interest, disincentivized CWIP’s use for nuclear energy. “That’s fine for gas turbines, because gas turbines don’t get canceled,” he said. “But for a nuclear plant, if they spend four or five billion dollars on a nuclear plant and then they cancel it, all that money is coming back to the consumers. I think that means no company is going to take that risk with the clawbacks we have.”

The argument is sometimes made in favor of CWIP that, if all goes well, charging ratepayers for the cost of building a power plant during its construction saves them money in the long run, because it avoids a scenario in which customers have to pay loan interest if the rate increases are deferred until project completion. Opponents of CWIP policies counter that even if the financing structure reduces costs in the scenario when all goes well, it simultaneously gives power companies enough guaranteed capital to make riskier choices about planning and spending. Under CWIP agreements, customers not only pay for the costs of construction, but also insure utility companies against the risk of delays or cancellations.

CWIP laws first emerged in the 1970s, during a period in which utility companies made the case to legislatures that they needed an alternative model of financing in order to contend with then-rising costs of power-plant construction and predicted growth in power demand, said Ari Peskoe, an expert in electricity law at Harvard Law School. “And then it turned out that the demand just didn’t materialize, for a number of reasons. Electricity demand was increasing like 8 to 10 percent a year, and then it went down to like 3 percent a year.”

This put states where nuclear projects broke ground and then were abandoned in the position of having to answer the difficult question of whether to charge ratepayers for the incomplete work. Those states where CWIP laws had been passed, however, were in a different position: “If you already had CWIP, if you had already been collecting a significant amount of these costs, it changes the calculus, because now ratepayers aren’t going to get that money back. They’ve already paid the billion dollars,” Peskoe said.

A subsequent wave of CWIP policies occurred in the early 2000s. A 2017 investigation by The Post and Courier found that CWIP and similar policies passed in 11 states “ignited a bonfire of risky spending” and financed three of the last decade’s most spectacular energy boondoggles: the Kemper Project, a failed $7.5 billion “clean coal” facility in Mississippi; the V.C. Summer expansion project, a failed $9 billion nuclear plant in South Carolina; and Units 3 and 4 at Plant Vogtle — a pair of nuclear reactors in Georgia which did actually get built, but seven years past their deadline and $17 billion over their original budget.

When a CWIP-financed project goes south, ratepayers have little practical guarantee that they can get their money back, said Daniel Tait, a researcher at the Energy and Policy Institute. “In the case of Mississippi, with Kemper, they did end up taking that money back and charging shareholders, only after lawsuits basically documenting fraud. V.C. Summer did not; even though people went to jail for fraud, customers are still paying for that to this day in South Carolina,” Tait said.

Amid the current crop of CWIP bills, all in Republican-dominated legislatures, one state provides something of a cautionary tale: A bill in the Ohio legislature aims to reverse a prior CWIP policy. The bill comes in the wake of a massive utility bribery scandal that landed the former speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives in prison.

Audits of the bribes paid to politicians in that scandal found that the power company FirstEnergy “capitalized a portion of this money as construction work in progress, even though it had nothing to do with building things,” said Dave Anderson, a researcher at the Energy and Policy Institute. “And it’s kind of still sitting on their books, waiting to be potentially collected from rate payers.”

Some of the recent CWIP bills are more protective of ratepayers than others, and they apply to different generation methods. But despite their differences, all of the bills come at a time when America’s electricity demand is projected to grow dramatically over the next few years because of the expansion of AI. Many states are competing to lure data centers with tax breaks (and with policies like CWIP), while others have so many data centers already planning to break ground that they are desperately augmenting their states’ power grids to accommodate the demand that utilities say is coming.

Crucially, though, there is significant uncertainty around the amount of load growth that will actually materialize from AI. Power companies have limited insight into how much more electricity generation they will actually need to build for, and if they overshoot or undershoot, someone will be stuck with the bill. Who pays for the risk of such a costly error is a consequential question.

“If you have a bunch of prospective load growth, there’s risk on two fronts: One, that it shows up and you’re using mechanisms like CWIP that essentially use captive ratepayers as the piggy bank for the benefit of others that are not paying their fair share,” said Tait, citing the example of a Meta data center in Louisiana whose costs advocates have raised concerns are being passed on to Entergy ratepayers. “The second is, what happens if the load doesn’t show up, the customers have already paid for it, and there’s no way out?”

CWIP policies could also lock in plans that some environmental advocates say might not be the best way to meet growth in electricity demand. “From an environmental standpoint, we want to have flexibility,” said Joshua Basseches, a professor at Tulane University who studies state-level energy and climate policy. “We don’t want just gas plants; we want to have microgrids and demand response and batteries and all this other stuff. But once you pass CWIP and then you start collecting for a plant that isn’t yet operative, it sort of forecloses other possibilities to meet that load in other ways.”

Those other possibilities would also be less profitable for power companies than the mere construction of capital-intensive power plants of the sort that are incentivized by CWIP policies. And to many observers, these industry-friendly bills are no surprise in light of those companies’ vast political and lobbying power in their respective states. Missouri’s governor has received some $400,000 in campaign donations from utility companies, according to an Energy and Policy Institute analysis. And the legislator who sponsored North Carolina’s CWIP bill, which passed the state senate shortly before his retirement, is a former executive at Duke Energy.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The obscure policy that financed many of the last decade’s riskiest energy investments is back on Apr 16, 2025.

This post was originally published on Grist.

On March 6, at the start of the still-simmering trade war between the U.S. and Canada, hydropower generator Hydro‑Québec quietly stopped exporting electricity to New England.

At a time of year when Canadian hydropower typically supplies up to a tenth of New England’s power, the region has instead gone almost a month with virtually no cross-border flow of electrons.

Hydro‑Québec leaders say low prices in the New England market — not politics — are behind the decision to suspend sales. The disruption hasn’t affected power costs or reliability in the region yet, but some experts say it could if the cutoff extends into the summer cooling season. The situation also highlights a potential risk to state clean energy plans that count on Canadian hydropower to help offset fossil fuels.

“This shows the potential for the region to be vulnerable to manipulations of the supply,” said Phelps Turner, director of clean grid for the Conservation Law Foundation.

Hydro‑Québec’s main transmission line into New England, known as the Phase II line, stopped exporting any meaningful amount of power two days after President Donald Trump’s tariff on Canadian imports went into effect. Last March, by comparison, anywhere from a few hundred megawatts to more than 1,200 MW flowed along the line at any given time, making up between 5 percent and 10 percent of the region’s electricity use on average, Turner estimated.

The longer that New England needs to replace the absent hydropower, the more often it will call on natural gas or oil power plants to fill the gap with dirtier and more expensive electricity, particularly as demand increases in the summer and again next winter.

“Electrically, this is pretty much the most boring time of year, and certainly a much easier time of year to have a source go away or be on pause here,” said Dan Dolan, president of the New England Power Generators Association. ​“There is going to be both a cost and environmental consequence if we see this be a really durable situation.”

The future of Canadian energy in New England

In an email from a company spokesperson, Hydro‑Québec attributed its lack of exports to market conditions, saying milder spring weather has lowered demand and thus prices. Others have theorized the move is also a show of power aimed at the Trump administration.

Hydro‑Québec has been sending signals for a while that it might be moving away from delivering power to New England at its historic levels. Last year, 5,560 gigawatt-hours of power traveled into the region over the Phase II line, less than half the amount exported in 2022. And in the last two forward capacity auctions run by grid operator ISO New England, Hydro‑Québec did not take on any obligation to provide power for 20 of the 24 months covered.

This pullback is likely due, at least in part, to ongoing abnormally dry and drought conditions in much of Quebec, which mean less water flow to power the company’s generators. Hydro-Québec, therefore, faces choices about what to do with the power it can generate, whether that means holding out for higher prices on the New England market or selling it domestically to meet the province’s own growing demand as it too electrifies in pursuit of climate goals.

“Hydro-Québec is proactively managing its energy reserves in the context of low runoff and, as such, will continue to limit its exports as it did in 2024,” said company spokesperson Lynn St-Laurent.

The lack of exports from Hydro-Québec coupled with the specter of fluctuating tariffs and counter-tariffs brings into focus the need for the New England grid to develop more stateside power resources and expand the infrastructure required to get energy where it’s needed, experts said.

“We’re going to need all the supply we can find, and part of that is going to come from Canadian hydro,” said Jeremy McDiarmid, managing director and general counsel at clean energy industry association Advanced Energy United. ​“We also need to be building things: We need to build transmission lines. We need to build new generation.”

Some are also concerned that ISO New England is not properly accounting for the declines in Canadian hydro supply. The grid operator’s planning process still uses the assumption that neighboring regions — mostly Quebec, Dolan said — will be willing and able to send 2,000 MW into New England at moments of exceptionally high demand, an expectation Dolan said ​“doesn’t strike me as responsible or appropriate reliability planning,” given the trend in the Canadian firm’s exports.

The situation has also raised questions about the New England Clean Energy Connect transmission line, a 145-mile project designed to import 1,200 MW of Hydro-Québec power into New England as part of a 20-year power purchase agreement with Massachusetts utilities. The line is expected to be operational starting in 2026, and a Hydro-Québec spokesperson said the company plans to deliver the power promised.

Recent circumstances, however, have those in the industry combing over the contracts to determine how solid Hydro-Québec’s commitment to deliver that power actually is and how tariffs might affect the terms of the deal. One promising sign, they said: The company is still sending electricity into the U.S. over a second, smaller transmission line that ends in Vermont, which has an agreement to buy power from Hydro-Québec until 2038.

“That does seem to suggest that [Hydro-Québec] is performing under existing contracts,” Turner said. ​“But every contract in every situation is different.”

In the meantime, the region will just have to wait and see what Hydro-Québec does next, without much information to go on.

“It’s hard to say what’s motivating the decision” to cut power flow, Turner said. ​“We just know it’s happening, but we don’t know why it’s happening.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In New England, Canadian hydropower has slowed to an ominous trickle on Apr 6, 2025.

This post was originally published on Grist.

If the only things certain in life are death and taxes, you might say corporate lobbyists spend much of their time trying to avoid at least one of the two. Few industries understand this better than oil and gas, which has benefited for at least a century from some tax rules that save them billions of dollars in payments annually.

The world’s nations have agreed to phase out fossil fuel subsidies globally. The Biden administration pledged to axe them domestically. Still, they persist.

Now, with Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration determined to enact $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and desperately looking for revenue and spending cuts to pay for them, some environmental advocacy groups are highlighting the tax benefits that flow to one of the world’s most profitable industries, which the Biden administration estimated at $110 billion over the decade ending in 2034.

The oil and gas industry, meanwhile, is playing both offense and defense, trying to maintain the benefits it has while working to enact at least one new one, which would shield some oil companies from a tax enacted as part of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

One of the biggest sources of new revenue from the IRA was a corporate alternative minimum tax, which was meant to prevent companies that reported large profits to investors from using loopholes to pay little to no taxes.

The minimum tax applies to all industries. For oil and gas, it has hit some of the large independent drillers in particular (as opposed to the “integrated” majors like ExxonMobil and Chevron). The money involved is significant: According to a new analysis by United to End Polluter Handouts, a coalition of environmental and progressive groups, at least three companies—EOG Resources, APA Corp. and Ovintiv—reported paying nearly $200 million collectively to the Treasury under the minimum tax since it was enacted in 2022. 

U.S. Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) has introduced a bill that would change the calculus by allowing oil companies to deduct some of their largest expenses against the minimum tax.

Lankford’s bill is included as a priority in the policy blueprint of the American Exploration & Production Council, which represents large independent oil and gas companies. 

Lukas Shankar-Ross, an author of the new minimum-tax analysis and deputy director of the climate and energy justice program at Friends of the Earth, pointed out that the Lankford bill would either deepen deficits or force more cuts to programs like Medicaid or other assistance for low-income Americans.

“I think it is as shameful a thing for me to imagine as is possible now,” Shankar-Ross said.

The oil and gas sector is the top industry contributor to Lankford’s campaigns in recent years, giving more than $546,000 since 2019, according to OpenSecrets. 

A spokesperson for Lankford said, “Promoting American energy independence is a reversal of the Biden Administration’s policies. Strong domestic energy production makes us less reliant on adversaries, and empowering oil and gas producers makes the United States stronger. Nobody is looking at cutting Medicaid benefits in order to pay for tax cuts, but fraud, waste, and abuse in the program should be examined.”

When it comes to the largest oil and gas companies, however, their focus might be elsewhere. When the American Petroleum Institute issued its five-point policy roadmap for the Trump administration and Congress in November, it highlighted a need to maintain what it called “crucial international tax provisions.”

Just one of those provisions, the so-called dual capacity taxpayer rule, is expected to save oil and gas companies $71.5 billion over a decade, according to Biden administration estimates.

Broadly speaking, federal tax law allows corporations to credit taxes they pay to foreign governments on overseas income against their U.S. tax bills, to avoid being taxed twice. The dual capacity taxpayer rule allows oil companies wide latitude in defining what exactly constitutes a tax payment, with the result being that they can count royalties and other payments as taxes, said Zorka Milin, policy director at the Financial Accountability & Corporate Transparency Coalition, which works to combat harmful impacts of illicit finance.

In fact, in some cases U.S. oil and gas companies might pay more in taxes and other payments to foreign governments than they do to the United States.

Exxon paid billions in overseas royalties alone in 2023, including $1.8 billion to the United Arab Emirates, $1 billion to the Canadian province Alberta and $761 million to Nigeria. Chevron paid about $2 billion in royalties to foreign governments. 

Milin said it is unclear how much of these royalty payments Exxon, Chevron and other oil companies might have claimed as credits against their U.S. taxes, but it could run into the billions of dollars annually.

“They make huge payments to governments around the world, including to some in some pretty shady places, and what is adding insult to injury is a lot of those payments are used to offset payments they pay here in the U.S.,” Milin said. “That’s one way in which our tax code is subsidizing these companies to go abroad and drill, baby, drill, but not domestically.”

Exxon, Chevron and the American Petroleum Institute did not respond to requests for comment.

Alex Muresianu, a senior policy analyst at the Tax Foundation, which supports pro-growth tax policies, said many of the oil industry-specific tax rules do not qualify as subsidies. Several of the rules, such as one that allows oil companies to deduct their drilling costs upfront, rather than over a well’s productive life, put the industry on an equal footing with other sectors, he argued. Oil companies often have high costs upfront that generate returns over many years, which can put them at a tax disadvantage with other industries, Muresianu said.

When it comes to royalties, these payments to mineral owners are generally tax deductible. But the dual capacity taxpayer rule offers a far better deal by turning them into a credit, an important distinction. Say Company A earned $100 million in profits, paid $5 million in royalties and paid the full 21 percent corporate income tax. Taking the royalty payments as a credit rather than a deduction would save it nearly $4 million. (Remember, U.S. tax laws are complex, so limitations might apply.)

Milin argued that Congress ought to look at the foreign tax breaks, especially as they are searching for more revenue, because these benefits effectively subsidize oil companies to drill overseas.

“When we have a more explicitly America First international economic policy on trade, on other issues, I think they are likely to look at the ways in which the tax code as it stands is inconsistent with that,” Milin said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Congress is searching for trillions of dollars in cuts. Will the oil industry’s tax breaks skate by? on Mar 30, 2025.

This post was originally published on Grist.

Jackson Voss loves his alma mater, Louisiana State University. He appreciates that his undergraduate education was paid for by a program dreamed up by an oil magnate and that he received additional scholarships from ExxonMobil and Shell.

But the socially conscious Louisiana native was also aware of what the support of those companies seemed to buy — silence.

Voss, who graduated from LSU in Baton Rouge 11 years ago with a degree in political science, says when he attended school there, he didn’t hear discussions of how climate change made Hurricane Katrina worse; why petrochemical plants along the Mississippi River sickened residents of the mostly Black communities around those facilities; or about the devastating and permanent impact of the BP oil spill that happened during Voss’ time at LSU.

Voss, now director of climate policy for the New Orleans-based consumer advocacy group, the Alliance for Affordable Energy, says he didn’t hear climate change or “Cancer Alley” openly discussed until he went to the University of Michigan, 1,100 miles away, for graduate school.

“It was not a place that was really discussing these issues in the way that should have been discussed at the time,” he said of LSU, where oil wells dotted the campus at least into the 1970s. Any such discussions weren’t taken seriously, he said, and even fellow students were often defensive of the industry. 

“The discussions that did happen had to focus on, kind of finding a way to talk about climate without talking about climate,” Voss said, “and it was especially important not to talk about the role that oil and gas played in worsening climate change.”

Whether through funding of research projects, the creation of new academic programs focused on energy or, more subtly, through support of everything from opera to football, the oil and gas industry has been shaping discourse at LSU — and universities around the world — for decades.

LSU administrators insist they have safeguards against undue influence by fossil fuel companies, which have given tens of millions of dollars to the university in just the past three years. But a joint investigation by Floodlight, WWNO/WRKF and the Louisiana Illuminator found the funding allows the industry to place a thumb on the scale of what gets studied at the state’s flagship university — and what is left out.

Research by Floodlight shows between 2010 and 2020, petrochemical companies gave LSU at least $44 million through their charitable foundations, making it one of the top recipients of fossil fuel funding among U.S. universities, based on research from the nonprofit Data for Progress.

LSU received more from petrochemical companies than the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and Texas A&M — and 20 times more than Voss’s other alma mater, the University of Michigan. The Data for Progress research showed over that decade, the 27 schools they examined received almost $700 million total.

Increasingly, researchers are questioning the longstanding ties between fossil fuels and universities at a time when scientists and governments across the globe overwhelmingly agree that sharply reducing the use of fossil fuels and increasing reliance on renewable energy are crucial to stalling or reversing climate change.

Last year, a joint report from Congress found “the oil and gas industry cultivates partnerships with academic institutions as a way to influence climate research.” And a first-of-its-kind study released by researchers last year found the fossil fuel industry’s approach is similar to how the tobacco, pharmaceutical and other industries co-opted academics. 

“It’s a situation exactly parallel to public health research being funded by the tobacco industry. It’s a conflict of interest — the size of an oil tanker,” said Geoffrey Supran, associate professor of environmental science and policy who studies fossil fuel disinformation at the University of Miami and is director of its Climate Accountability Lab. He says LSU and other schools like it have become “an echo chamber for pro-fossil-fuel narratives.”

LSU and its president, William Tate IV, have doubled down on the university’s ties with the fossil fuel industry in recent years, despite its shrinking importance to the Louisiana economy. Since 2020, Tate has solicited and received more than $30 million from fossil fuel companies, including a record $27.5 million from Shell.

During LSU’s Giving Day campaign on Wednesday, Shell plopped down another $1.5 million for LSU libraries and the College of Science.

“It’s time for a partnership in significant fashion to link the work at LSU in our energy areas, including alternative energy, and creating ways to keep that industry vibrant here in this state and for our country,” Tate told reporters in 2022, about a year after he was named to head the school. 

LSU insists there are firewalls in place to prevent oil and gas companies from unduly influencing research and study. But public records and interviews indicate that fossil fuel funding can have a subtle and even direct impact on research and critical discourse. 

“Universities are at risk of being pawns in a climate propaganda scheme devised and implemented by fossil fuel interests for decades,” Supran said. 

‘Tip of the iceberg’

It’s impossible to pin down how much money fossil fuel interests — or any industry — gives to universities such as LSU. Although it is a public institution, much of the money for scholarships, workforce development and buildings goes through LSU’s foundation — a nonprofit separate from the university. The foundation, in accordance with philanthropic standards, does not disclose its donors unless they agree to be identified.

In its research, Data for Progress used public announcements from universities and companies, along with tax filings from fossil fuel companies’ foundations, to determine how much the universities received from those companies.

“It’s most likely the tip of the iceberg,” said Jake Lowe, executive director of Campus Climate Network, which under its previous name, Fossil Free Research, worked with Data for Progress to create its 2023 report. 

For example, the report includes millions of dollars the ExxonMobil Foundation gives for scholarships — but not the money going directly from the company to a school or its foundation.

“If the ExxonMobil corporation has a research contract with LSU, you’re not going to see that in the tax documents or annual reports,” Lowe said.

Floodlight, with the help of a Data for Progress researcher, used the same method to look at how much petrochemical money went to LSU. The analysis included examining public announcements from the companies and tax filings, called 990s, of the foundations for Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Entergy, Koch Inc., Southwest Electric Power Corp., Schlumberger (now known as SLB), Dow and Taylor Oil.

From 2010 to 2020, Taylor Oil’s foundation gave the most to LSU, almost $21 million.  

The second highest amount was from ExxonMobil, which gave more than $10 million — the majority of which came from a matching gift program in which the company gave $3 for every dollar donated by an employee or retiree to a college or university.

But then, in 2022, Shell dwarfed the amount given over the previous decade with a single $27.5 million donation to LSU. The majority, $25 million, was for a new Institute for Energy Innovation to focus on “scholarship and solution delivery” on “hydrogen and carbon capture … the coast; and low-carbon fuels.”

Donations buy influence 

LSU doesn’t hide that the institute’s mission was shaped in partnership with the industry. In the early days, a former Shell executive, Rhoman Hardy, served as the research center’s interim director. The company also has three of the institute’s seven board seats; industry groups hold another two.

Last year, the nonprofit New Orleans news outlet The Lens discovered LSU created a system: If a fossil fuel company gives $50,000 or more to the institute, it gets the right to participate in a specific research project, to use the intellectual property from that project and “robust review and discussion of the specific study and project output.”

For a $1.25 million donation, a company also receives “voting rights for selected institute activities, including research.” A contribution of $5 million or more earns a donor a seat on the institute’s board.

When reached for comment about the institute, its donations and its potential influence, Shell responded, “We’re proud to partner with LSU to contribute to the growing compendium of peer-reviewed climate science and advance the effort to identify multiple pathways and build the ecosystems that can lead to more energy with fewer emissions.”

In 2023, ExxonMobil gave $2 million to LSU and became a “strategic” partner. With the donation, ExxonMobil will work with the institute to study batteries, solar power, carbon capture and “advanced” plastics recycling. ExxonMobil did not respond to a request for comment about the donation or about the money it has previously given to LSU.

At a Louisiana Board of Regents’ Energy Transition Research Symposium at LSU later that year, ExxonMobil gave a presentation on advanced plastics recycling, a controversial technology that opponents say amounts to greenwashing the problem of plastic waste by burning it rather than reusing it.

“It is clear based on the board and research focus areas of the new Institute for Energy Innovation that it is focused squarely on innovations using fossil fuels,” said Logan Atkinson Burke, Voss’ boss at the Alliance for Affordable Energy, an energy consumer advocacy group.

Environmentalists say technologies being studied by the institute, including carbon capture, hydrogen and low-carbon fuels, are “false solutions” that will do little to address the climate crisis.

‘Subconscious’ bias? 

The institute’s current director, Brad Ives, and LSU’s vice president for research and economic development, Robert Twilley, say they have put safeguards in place to prevent industry influence.

And Twilley says this type of research — working hand in hand with industries on the ground — is core to the mission of LSU as a land grant university, a program Abraham Lincoln established in 1862 that used federal land sales to fund universities focused on practical subjects including architecture, engineering and agriculture.

“It’s how we as an institution manage it and the safeguards and being very conscious of our ethics, being very conscious of what projects we work on,” Twilley said.

He points to federal guidelines, the scientific method and peer review as some of the safeguards that keep the university’s research independent from industry influence. The institute sends its research proposals to an anonymous third-party panel of scientists to be ranked, Twilley says. Those rankings help decide what research it funds.

Ives says funders aren’t allowed contact with researchers either.

“What we’re doing is making sure that the researchers have total academic freedom to let the research take them where it goes,” Ives said. “We know we can sleep at night because we are not doing anything that’s wrong.”

But Supran, who once worked on projects funded by oil and gas, says it’s not always as simple as a researcher purposefully skewing results. Scientists are only human, making these relationships inherently fraught.

“We’re all subject to biases,” he said. “Things like reciprocation. You know that if I give you a pen, you have some small subconscious desire to reciprocate it in some sense down the line.”

For example, one study showed how reviews of the health effects of secondhand smoke funded by the tobacco industry were almost 90 times more likely to conclude that it was not harmful compared to reviews funded by other sources.

There’s evidence that the lines between funding and academic independence are sometimes blurred at LSU. Several influential reports and studies from LSU’s Center for Energy Studies have drawn scrutiny over the years for being misleading. In one case, a utility-funded report led to the dismantling of Louisiana’s successful rooftop solar program. In another, a report helped curb efforts to sue oil and gas companies for decades of environmental damage, claiming the lawsuits cost the state more than it would gain.

A more recent example was found in public records reviewed by WWNO, including a contract between the Center for Energy Studies and the Bracewell law firm, representing Gulf Coast Sequestration. That company wants to store millions of tons of carbon dioxide underground in southwest Louisiana. It asked the center to use the project as a case study for the economic impact of a carbon capture industry on the Gulf Coast.

The contract suggests that some of the report’s conclusions were reached even before the study began. The researchers said they planned to “underscore the transformative nature of CCS (carbon capture and sequestration) on the Louisiana economy.”

LSU’s final report ultimately listed all of the financial reasons the Gulf Coast should welcome the projects like this one — while barely mentioning the economic risks, such as the cost and financial viability of  carbon capture facilities.

WWNO showed the report to several researchers familiar with sponsored research. All of them shared concerns over the prescriptive nature of the research proposal or the terms of the contract itself.

LSU allows research sponsors to give feedback on drafts before they’re published. Sponsors are also allowed to stay anonymous — meaning, the public doesn’t know who funds the research.

“It gets a D grade and it’s not quite an F,” Supran said, noting that in this case, the funder was disclosed. “ The fact that this report just touts the economic benefits of this specific company funding the report — it kind of makes you wonder if it’s worth the paper it’s written on.”

The report’s authors declined to comment. Twilley defended the contract, saying its terms are standard throughout the university and that researchers are allowed to propose hypotheses. 

The contract is not illegal nor does it constitute research misconduct such as using fake data or plagiarizing. But according to one elected official, reports like these, which carry the credibility of a university without the scrutiny of peer review, could influence public policy.

“The research plays a significant role in determining whether or not we’re on the right or wrong course,” said Davante Lewis, a public service commissioner in Louisiana. His commission regulates services in Louisiana including the electric utilities.

Lewis said he counts on such academic reports to provide a fair and comprehensive picture of an issue. But, as more industry money enters research, he said he was concerned, noting, “Oftentimes we have seen where money drives facts, not facts drive money.”

Burnishing their reputations

Besides funding LSU’s energy institute, oil and gas interests also pays for things everyone likes, such as health programs, tutoring and even halftime kicking contests with football fans.

Supran says he and other researchers have a working theory that while oil and gas companies pour big money into big research institutions such as MIT and Stanford to give them credibility, they spend money at regional universities in states including Louisiana and Texas to build a compliant population.

“It doesn’t take a genius to imagine that that money may be used to burnish the reputation locally of those companies and foster a vibrant recruitment pool,” Supran said.

Voss says the oil and gas industry’s support of benefits for the state are “one of the few things that it actually has right.” On the flip side, he added, “I think it protects the industry from criticism, because it makes people feel like they’re a part of the community.”

But the heavy presence of oil and gas on campus can have a chilling effect on people and groups who don’t support those industries.

Jill Tupitza, now a marine scientist in California, was a graduate student at LSU when she and fellow graduate student Corinne Salter started Climate Pelicans, an advocacy organization that worked to get LSU to stop investing in fossil fuels.

When they started questioning the ties between LSU and fossil fuels, they were met with resistance.

“Immediately, doors were shut,” Tupitza said.

One administrator told her, “‘I can’t tell you what to do, I can’t punish you for going further. But I would strongly recommend that you stop asking questions about this,’” she recalled. “So that, obviously, that made us double down.”

The group led marches and a petition drive urging climate divestment. They started a podcast that explored topics including environmental justice and false climate solutions.

Tupitza said the LSU Foundation stonewalled the group’s requests for information about how much money it had invested in fossil fuels and refused requests to attend meetings about the foundation’s $700 million endowment. Later, the foundation told Tupitza that less than 4% of its holdings were invested in fossil fuels

And then, while Tupitza and fellow graduate students were writing “Divest from Fossil Fuels,” in pink chalk in front of the foundation building, they were arrested on graffiti charges. 

Those charges were eventually dropped. School rules prohibit writing on the sidewalks with chalk, but it is not an arrestable offense. Tupitza described her arrest as “a huge scare tactic.”. 

Supran says LSU isn’t unique in its hesitation to cut ties with the oil and gas industry. 

“I think it’s fair to say that for the most part, there has not been careful deliberation about the costs and the benefits of these ties, but rather a head down, and aggressive, solicitation of as much funding as they can receive from anyone.”

Voss predicts that if conditions worsen in an industry known for its booms and busts, its support for LSU will disappear. And as climate change worsens, it will make it harder for businesses and people to stay in Louisiana, which is already near the top of U.S. states when it comes to population loss. 

“In many ways, higher education is sitting upon a house of cards, and relying upon oil and gas is incredibly risky — as it always has been.”

Instead, he said, “I think that LSU could and should be a really critical voice in climate change and environmental justice in Louisiana. I do worry that in failing to do so and by being so heavily tied up in oil and gas interests, it actually puts the university in a worse position.”

This is Part 2 of a two-part investigative series exploring the relationship between the fossil fuel industry and Louisiana State University. This story was reported by a partnership with WWNO/WRKF, the Louisiana Illuminator and Floodlight.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Oil and gas money shapes research, creates ‘echo chamber’ in higher education on Mar 29, 2025.

This post was originally published on Grist.