Straightforwardly Pro-Fossil Fuel Affiliate Programs in the Doerr School of “Sustainability”

Sept 27, 2023

As the school year progresses, we will continue our summer-style scoops and add in action items and other updates. We’ve been pleased to see so many new sign-ups for our newsletter and follows on our socials since classes began, and such expressions of support. For new folks, you can read our backlog here and get more of the lay of the land here.

So far this summer, we’ve covered relatively new Doerr School of “Sustainability” affiliate programs that are heavily fossil-funded and that in many ways serve Big Oil’s strategy of distraction and delay, but that nonetheless frame themselves as sustainability-focused and that in many cases include genuinely pro-climate research along with the greenwashing.

For a change of pace, today we are covering the Smart Fields Consortium (SFC), one of the Doerr School of “Sustainability’s” older affiliate programs. These older programs tend to be more straightforwardly focused on helping oil and gas companies explore for, extract, and refine oil and gas. Some have hastily thrown CO2 storage into their homepage descriptions for plausible deniability, but there is little evidence their actual published research has shifted away from helping oil and gas companies produce oil and gas.

There are many more such affiliate programs in the Doerr School beyond the SFC, programs that we will cover in due time. After discussing the SFC, we’ll also discuss the Doerr School’s Petroleum Investments Fund.

The Smart Fields Consortium

The Smart Fields Consortium (SFC) is funded by Chevron, ExxonMobil, Saudi Aramco, and several other oil and gas companies. Until October 2021, the SFC’s research description read:

“Our aim is to develop efficient software tools for the optimization of oil field development and operations. This includes data assimilation, fast simulation, model updating, and optimal control. Techniques being developed by our group are essential for the success of Smart Fields, also known in industry by names such as i-fields, e-fields, Field of the Future, etc. Optimal control can be implemented in existing fields at any stage of their development and in new fields. We have demonstrated that traditional approaches for developing and operating oil and gas fields are rarely optimal. The positional gains of deploying these new technologies are very significant.”

It was then abruptly jargonized to read:

“Computational optimization, history matching (data assimilation), uncertainty quantification, and data interpretation are key technologies for modern reservoir management. The Stanford Smart Fields Consortium (SFC) is a multidisciplinary program that performs state-of-the-art research in these important areas… A key SFC focus area is the development of deep neural network surrogate models to greatly reduce the computation required for these applications.”

The meaning is the same: the SFC helps oil companies extract oil by figuring out how to do their computations more efficiently. This second description remained until January 2023 — shortly after Stanford’s former president appointed a committee to investigate fossil fuel influence on campus. Remember, this was the SFC’s stated goal as late as 2023, in a school of sustainability.

After January 2023, and through to today, the description reads:

“Computational optimization, history matching (data assimilation), uncertainty quantification, and data interpretation are important technologies for modern reservoir management and carbon storage operations. The Stanford Smart Fields Consortium is a multidisciplinary program that performs state-of-the-art research in these important areas… A key SFC focus is the extension and application of computational methodologies developed for oil/gas production to carbon storage (and eventually hydrogen storage) operations. Several of our projects involve the development of deep-neural-network surrogate models to greatly reduce the computation required for Smart Fields applications.” [Bolding of changed wording added]

We hope this change in language represents a real transition in research. It can take a long time to change a research program, so we don’t yet know, but recent publications do not bode well. One of the program’s most recent publications, from this year, reports a more computationally efficient method of optimizing production from oil and gas wells. The only gesture to anything else is a line in the conclusion, “Application of the framework to other recovery processes and CO2 storage operations should also be investigated.”

Remember, this is 2023. Even if the change in language of the description did represent a real change in research, it is too little, too late, and carbon storage itself is considered by many — including those formerly in the oil and gas industry — to be a greenwashing scheme.

This example points to another problem with fossil funding, beyond the many we have already covered. The above paper acknowledges use of Stanford’s Center for Computational Earth and Environmental Sciences as well as funding from both the Stanford Graduate Fellowship and from the SFC’s affiliate companies. The existence of the fossil-funded SFC is pulling non-fossil resources along with it, resources that could be employed on something other than helping oil and gas companies produce oil and gas.

The Doerr School Petroleum Investments Fund

To the best of our knowledge, the Stanford Doerr School of “Sustainability” has a fund that specifically invests in producing oil and gas fields. It yields discretionary funds for the dean, Arun Majumdar.

This conclusion is based on a 2014 document, which states the following:

“Established in 1953, the PIF is an endowment that invests in producing oil and gas royalties and other mineral and energy interests to provide discretionary income for use by the dean to support the teaching and research of the School of Earth Sciences—$1.628 million for the 2013 fiscal year. The principal value of the PIF has grown from about $4 million in 1996 to its current $48 million.”

We have not been able to find any publicly-available evidence that the fund has been retired and thus have reason to assume it has been folded into the new Stanford Doerr School along with the rest of the School of Earth. Our organization is primarily concerned with fossil fuel companies funding research (not issues of endowment or investments). However, if this fund still exists, it sufficiently concerning in a school of “sustainability” that we thought it ought to be highlighted.