Randall Ebner, Vice President & General Counsel, Exxon Mobil Corp. (retired) & Chair, Advisory Board, Tulane Energy Law & Policy Center
Education and research are critical to securing our energy future. Innovation and technology are key drivers of growth in the energy industry. You can look at any industry and see how society has benefited through innovation resulting from research, engineering and development of sound technologies that solve significant problems and open the doors to new opportunities. The energy industry fits the same trend. It is in fact a leader in this trend. To give just one example in the last ten years, innovation and engineering turned the U.S. from an energy importer into a leading energy exporter. That took a clear-eyed understanding of how business leaders work together with engineers and then structure the deployment of new technology with help of top legal minds.
This means that energy education must train students to think across disciplines. For example, when you look at what skills young energy lawyers need, a key skill they need to have is a broad understanding of the underlying business. It is next to impossible to advise and counsel clients on whatever they are undertaking, whether that is drilling an oil well, developing a new technology, providing regulatory reviews, without a comprehensive understanding of the underlying business. You need to understand how the business makes money. You need to know what risks the client can assume and which ones it cannot. As importantly, you need to learn to manage risks creatively to enable you to create new opportunities and markets that your competitors could never imagine. To understand all this, lawyers need to understand not only the current business environment, but also to have a clear vision as to what the future business could to evolve to and be on top of the game in helping their business clients achieve those long-term objectives. I have a saying, “They call it the practice of law because lawyers should be practical.” When you are in law school you learn theory, which is important, but once a lawyer graduates and enters the practice, their clients want practical, market-based solutions.
The same is also true about technology. A good energy lawyer must have a general idea how the business operates. It is impossible to understand risk in the energy business without some understanding of the technology used in the sector. Technology tells you what you can control and what you cannot control. If you understand this, you can help your clients produce better structures to make their business work. If you do not understand the underlying technology at least from 50,000 feet you are going to be in trouble. So to create an energy lawyer, you need to give a first-class lawyer a commercial understanding of energy business and energy technology instead of just hitting the law books.
As you think about energy education in the future, what you need is an institution that “gets” energy. You need to find research leaders who work across disciplines to produce practical real-world solutions that can move us forward. Topflight universities use their research and teaching talent to solve critical problems. To solve problems, the whole university team needs to collaborate around the shared value: being pragmatic. Get us answers that we can deploy in the real world. Pragmatism means that the future of energy discussion should be objective and factually based. Specifically, the focus of the discussion should rely on factually supported sound science, engineering, technology, and related considerations. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to the future. That has been true of the energy business since its inception over 150 years ago. The energy business has consistently shown its ability to be an innovative and resilient business by finding and implementing solutions that support society as a whole.
Students who learn in an environment like that will become leaders. And we will need energy leaders like that to enable the energy business to address tomorrow’s challenges and seize its opportunities. When I look at the history of the energy business, it is the industry’s resilience which excites me - this business has always been able to innovate approaches to meet society’s energy needs in ways that make energy accessible to not only local communities but global communities. This industry has proven that it knows how to be dynamic. It is never stagnant, it’s always strategic, creative and moving forward. The challenge is that a lot of folks do not understand that given the complexity of the energy landscape, pragmatic solutions just do not come overnight. They take a long time. They require patience. You need to have creativity and persistence, and you need to understand what is necessary to achieve those objectives. You cannot just say, “Tomorrow, I want to do this,” because it’s not as simple as that. You must learn today what engineering solutions can have scalable commercial success and then you need to structure those solutions and finance them and implement them. All that takes time. All that takes leadership. All that takes an education that gets you ready to be a leader. That is why choosing where you learn, from whom you learn, and how you learn is so important. It sets you up for success or, if you do it wrong, for failure.
Tulane is a place that gets it right. There is the right mix. Look at Tulane’s annual Future of Energy Forums. They bring so many folks who are innovators and who have a passion for the energy business together to share their thoughts and ideas and engage in dialogue about the future energy landscape through a pragmatic lens. Many of these leaders teach students in the classroom all over campus. Tulane trains students to break down silos. They collaborate here to cross-teach classes together and give their students a real look at how teams work in the real world.
Add to that – Tulane is in Louisiana, one of the hubs of the energy world. That location brings tremendous practical advantages. Through its diverse curricula including engineering, business, finance, law and policy, Tulane has been a leader in educating generations of professionals and leaders who spend their careers in the energy business. I am confident that Tulane will continue to build on that history by educating future generations of professionals and leaders who will support the energy business through practical innovation and creativity. It is an example of the mix you need for energy research and education leadership.
There are plenty of other places that excel, as well. But do these people work together? Do they provide students critical commercial context and teach them about how to understand and deploy facts to produce creative market-based solutions? Do they show you the technology? Do they teach you the business side? And do they teach you how law and policy affect all of it?
If you find a place like that, you are in an energy university and an energy program. That’s what you need if you want to be successful in the energy business. That is the kind of academic environment that not only exists, but flourishes at Tulane.
