Louisiana State University President William Tate IV visits Shell’s facility in Convent, La., in 2023 to talk about his plan to focus on five areas at the university, including energy. Shell has announced it will convert the former oil refinery into one that produces lower carbon fuels. (Louisiana State University)
This is Part 2 of a two-part investigative project exploring the relationship between the fossil fuel industry and Louisiana State University. Read Part 1 here. This story was reported by a partnership with WWNO/WRKF, the Louisiana Illuminator and Floodlight. You can listen to the accompanying Sea Change podcast here.
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.
It’s a conflict of interest — the size of an oil tanker
– Geoffrey Supran
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 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.
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‘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 paid 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.
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.” The foundation later told Tupitza that less than 4% of its holdings were invested in fossil fuels.
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.”
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