Pumping and permanently storing carbon dioxide under vast stretches of Louisiana forest and farmland has triggered grassroots opposition, as the reality of more than 30 such proposed projects has taken hold over the past two years.
Companies proposing to convert hundreds to thousands of acres of farmland into solar farms have faced similar opposition from pockets of rural Louisiana, including in the state’s sugar cane growing regions.
The “energy transition” that some officials and business leaders say has arrived in Louisiana is bringing uncomfortable change and conflict to a state with nearly 125 years of history with oil and gas.
During a recent energy symposium, a top LSU executive floated the concept of having the state’s flagship university create a new cooperative extension service that could serve as an unbiased mediator and science-based information source on energy. The concept, however, may step into a potentially sensitive area for LSU, with some having previously raised concerns over whether the university has too close a relationship with the carbon capture and energy industries.
The model, according to the LSU executive, Robert Twilley, could be the LSU Ag Center’s and LSU Sea Grant’s decades-old cooperative extension services. LSU Ag Center includes the popular Louisiana Master Gardener Program.
Twilley, LSU vice president for research and economic development who formerly led the LSU Sea Grant program, said creating a cooperative extension for energy would match a trend happening in some other land grant universities to expand extension services beyond agriculture.
The cooperative extension services, which have the mission of bringing new research to the public, so the public can apply it, have a physical presence in all 64 parishes that could serve as the home for a new energy cooperative extension, Twilley suggested.
Combined with the recently formed LSU Energy Institute, the effort could tap into the university’s expertise to address the multi-disciplinary questions energy raises and, Twilley argued, fulfill an obligation that a public research university has to serve as a trusted source of information.
‘Informed, trusted agent’
Twilley told the forum audience that early discussions have occurred, including an idea, as a first step, to give agents an “Energy 101” class so they can field some questions and direct people to more expert LSU sources.
“The key part of the extension service is that people live in these communities,” Twilley said during the LSU Energy Research Symposium on Friday. “That’s really critical because they’re trusted individuals, and they are trained in how to actually deal with being the informed, trusted agent.”
On Monday, Tara Smith, LSU executive associate vice president and director of the Louisiana Cooperative Extension Service at LSU AgCenter, said she wasn’t aware of a formal plan to implement the idea.
Smith, who sat on the forum panel moderated by Twilley, said there would have to be “a lot of future discussions” at the “highest levels to make something like that happen.”
Among those challenges, according to Twilley, is finding the people and money.
At the forum, he floated the idea of the U.S. Department of Energy providing the dollars to avoid the inevitable credibility questions industry funding might generate.
Other concerns existed for some. State Sen. Bob Hensgens, R-Abbeville, who attended the forum and grew up in a family of rice farmers, remarked on the credibility the agricultural extension service had with his grandfather.
Hensgens asked if having the extension services step into the current “messy” energy debate would harm the trust people have put in the services.
‘Not take sides’
Greg Upton, executive director of the LSU Center for Energy Studies who has spoken at some community forums to provide information on carbon capture, has already faced criticism. Upton is also interim director of the new Energy Institute.
But Smith and another forum panel member, Rex Caffey, an LSU natural resource economics professor and director of the Sea Grant marine extension, explained they believed the cooperative model could stay above the fray.
“Our stock and trade is to get involved in controversial issues and the way we protect ourselves is to bring science-based information and to not take sides. Our motto is ‘be descriptive, not prescriptive,'” Caffey said.