Can Louisiana’s energy past power its energy future?

A Louisiana State University chemical engineering professor perfected electrolyzers that turn waste carbon dioxide into useful stuff. 

At a local gym in Baton Rouge, he met the entrepreneur behind a nearby craft brewery. Joined by a risk-tolerant PhD coming back home, they formed Encore CO. The company is using a hard seltzer product to demonstrate other industrial uses for repurposing a waste product into a resource. 

That satisfying mix of science and serendipity is backed by strategy, said Michael Mazzola, the executive director of Future Use of Energy in Louisiana. 

FUEL is a consortium created to administer one of the National Science Foundation’s Regional Innovation Engines: a program that was billed as putting up to $1.6 billion into almost a dozen regional efforts to advance applied science.

Like the EDA Tech Hubs program, its US Dept. of Commerce cousin, the NSF Engines program is a well-regarded bipartisan test of modern industrial policy — government investments into favored industries. Whether both can survive, or even grow, under successive presidential administrations is a bellwether. How will the United States respond to a perceived challenge from the Chinese Communist Party to “overwhelm” Americans in science and technology? That the Trump administration opened a funding call to tech hubs is a good signal, but National Science Foundation funding is more at risk than the Commerce Department, according to one federal budget watcher.

For now, FUEL is among the program’s bright lights. It’s an “ecosystem approach” in a reliably Republican state that pairs serious scientific research with hard-charging entrepreneurship, reliable corporate stewardship and responsive workforce development. 

Encore CO₂ is one of Mazzola’s first case studies, as FUEL invested a $200,000 grant into the startup. He’ll need more. Anyone who knows anything about startup investing, or scientific research for that matter, knows that a smart strategy has lots of bets. 

Government is famously less risk tolerant than (and at least as fickle as) private investors. So Mazzola, like the principal investigators leading dozens of other place-based industrial policy programs enacted in the last half-decade, has a tall order: Appease federal bureaucrats, local policymakers and a growing list of stakeholders while ensuring credible science leads to good-faith bets on the market.

Meanwhile, for Mazzola, all that hangs in the balance of his program is up to $160 million in years of funding, and the future of energy.

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‘People and place’

Direct government funding of commercialized science (as opposed to basic research) often gets saddled with too many goals, to ensure political support. 

FUEL, like its peers, has priorities that are economic, social, scientific and political. 

One reason regions still covet these sorts of programs is they typically come with a satisfying reinforcement of a local identity. In FUEL’s case, its focus ensures Louisiana’s role in the future of energy — a foundational building block of modern life.

No question Louisiana already plays a major role. The state is a top five natural-gas producer in the United States, and top 15 for energy production overall — though little from renewables so far. It’s also a heavyweight in petrochemicals,  as the group’s NSF application reinforced. 

Wedged between the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico, fully five of the top 15 American ports that handle the most cargo are in Louisiana, per 2023 data. Much of the value of that tonnage comes from shipping out an array of oil and gas products. 

Louisiana’s argument is that it’s a crossroads, and a low-carbon economy must go through its state lines.

“This program is about people in place,” Mazzola told me. “The evidence is that targeted investments here connect innovators to entrepreneurs — and you see companies like Encore CO₂ form because the pieces are already nearby.”

Can energy’s past be part of the energy future?

Too many “ecosystem” initiatives announce a bootcamp and call it a day, argues FUEL’s workforce lead Lacy McManus. An existing workforce is helpful, but new energy forms will demand new skills.

“We go where there’s momentum and capital-stack our programs,” McManus said of piecing together existing programs to fill gaps. “We’re co-designing with employers from the jump.” 

One example: a teacher professional-development intensive run through SOWELA Technical Community College that bakes carbon-management and entrepreneurship modules directly into rural classrooms. FUEL seeded it with $100,000, and oil and gas giant ExxonMobil expanded it after seeing generative outcomes. 

Herein lies understandable skepticism. Can any leader from energy’s past really play a part in energy’s future? 

This debate appears elsewhere: Can the “bridge fuel” of natural gas really be an “environmentally sustainable” way to power data centers in Pennsylvania? (Yes, if the transition isn’t allowed to be a stall tactic).

“We’re not standing still,” Michael Butler of ExxonMobil’s public and government told me of the obvious critique. Towering energy giants must be part of the transition, and so they’re building carbon capture and storage across the Gulf Coast — capturing CO₂ from hard-to-abate sites and storing it thousands of feet underground. “And we need a world-class Louisiana workforce to do it.” 

The company points to a growing CCS pipeline and storage network stretching across Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.

What to watch

FUEL has put numbers on the table: 60 companies, with 80% building wealth in Louisiana, and a path toward $2 billion in impact from carbon-management innovation. 

Mazzola joked that he’s competing against energy-giant Texas, which is half-true. He wears a place-based economic developer’s hat, and so Louisiana is his top priority. But if he manages to reach his goals, the energy problems his coalition helps address ought to benefit the rest of us.

If the energy transition is going to be real, it won’t be invented along in a think tank conference room. It will be commercialized in the places that already move the molecules — on river corridors, near refineries and along pipeline rights-of-way — by people who can turn a lab breakthrough into a payroll line.

Louisiana’s brewpub-to-bench-to-startup story is a reminder: The future shows up locally first, or it doesn’t show up at all.

Mazzola is here for it. He told me: “I hope everyone else is watching.”