UNC’s Energy Center Mission Statement Revisited – 2026

Director’s Blog XXVI – UNC ’s Energy Center Mission Statement Revisited – 2026

By Stephen V. Arbogast

It is time for the UNC Kenan-Flagler Energy Center’s mission statement to evolve.  Increasingly, it must address the multiple challenges of how to secure plentiful, affordable and secure energy supplies that are also much lower in carbon output.  This revised focus extends rather than reinvents what the Center has been doing since its inception.

The Kenan-Flagler Energy Center enters its twelfth year when the next full-time MBA class arrives this July.  Initially it saw its mission as twofold: 1) distilling ‘the business of energy’, i.e. its keys to commercial success, and building full value chain curriculum upon that content; and 2) convening conferences and conducting research in the spirit of the traditional university, i.e. to pursue questions important to the development of sound public policy but doing so where getting to a higher degree of truth is the goal.

At first, the questions chosen for focus were ‘topical,’ i.e., they reflected issues on the industry’s radar screen for which the answers were not obvious.  A good example was our 2016 Global Fracking Conference. There the question was would the U.S. shale revolution soon go global (answer: unlikely at oil prices < $90/B).  Starting in 2018, our focus began to change.  A strong campaign for a de-carbonizing Energy Transition gathered steam, and incoming MBA classes increasingly prioritized this focus.  The Center understood this campaign as too single-minded and in important ways at odds with economic fundamentals of the business.  Our research and events increasingly took on a role of critiquing popular approaches to the Energy Transition and a search for a more feasible path forward.

Some examples illustrate this evolution. In 2018, we reported that renewables intermittency made wind/solar ill suited to provide baseload power and expensive if they were cast in that role.  This has caused the Center to repeatedly characterize as misleading EIA/IEA reports that renewables are the cheapest forms of power generation. A year later we reported that 10-hour battery discharge would remain an elusive goal for another decade and that carbon capture technologies would need $90/ton subsidies to enter commercial usage.  In 2021, we reported that new nuclear capacity would be needed to decarbonize the U.S. power industry, an argument which preceded the subsequent nuclear renaissance by three years.  Subsequent events affirmed all these conclusions.

Our 2023 electric vehicles conference determined that the life-cycle Carbon Footprint of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) was not much superior to plug-in hybrids (PHVs) when critical mineral supplies were taken into account.  PHVs, which don’t require building out a nation-wide recharging system and which don’t suffer from the range/refueling issues of BEVs, thus make more sense as a bridge Transition solution. Most recently, our Clean Tech Summit panels have identified permitting and other regulatory issues as major barriers to implementing many feasible forms of lower carbon energy.

Positions such as these, which were counter-cultural when first broached, have increasingly been adopted by the mainstream.  World events have forced attention to shift away from a single-minded focus on decarbonization.  Starting with Russia’s 2022 invasion of the Ukraine and continuing through the current Strait of Hormuz oil shock, energy availability, price and reliability have forced nations to revise which issues command priority.  Indeed, one can argue that de-carbonization has been sharply downgraded in priority – to a point where it is being subordinated to these other goals.

This inversion explains why this is a proper moment for reconsidering the Center’s mission statement.  Our revised focus must be ‘the Working Out of the Dual Challenge’ – that is the optimal pursuit of plentiful, secure and affordable energy while materially reducing carbon emissions.  For emphasis, the Center must help sustain focus on carbon reduction goals even as strategies like ‘Energy Dominance’ take center stage on the national scene.

In this regard, an important supporting goal must be the pursuit of a consensus U.S. national Energy policy.  Today, many of the most feasible options for de-carbonization still require public support.  Typical nascent industry barriers, like the intimidating economics of ‘First of a Kind’ plants and the challenges associated with building out a new industry to scale, require sustained public sector support.  Innovators and their investors will not see incentives to proceed on these paths if the subsidies and mandates on which they must initially depend are liable to be removed after the next election.

With these points in mind, our revised Mission Statement must now include: “Convening industry conferences and conducting research devoted to ‘How to Meet the Energy Dual Challenge,’ and include defining and promoting a ‘Consensus National Energy Policy.’  This revised mission statement will be reviewed with the Center’s Advisory Board and then published on the Center’s media platforms.

Finally, our mission to distill the Business of Energy and then educate our students with this content remains intact.  Thus, our mission statement must include how we work with the Kenan-Flagler Business School to equip our Energy MBA students with the best “real world” understanding of the energy industry’s commercial challenges and to prepare those students to be job ready.

 The revised mission statement, to be posted on our website and LinkedIn page, thus reads as follows:

 The UNC Kenan-Flagler Energy Center promotes achieving an effective, consensus national energy policy that addresses the dual energy challenge — providing plentiful, affordable, and secure energy while materially reducing Greenhouse Gas emissions —  and educating students in all sectors of the energy industry.  We achieve this mission through:

1. Well-informed, balanced thought leadership, research and events conducted by the Energy Center
2. High-quality, industry-led energy education through the Kenan-Flagler Business School
3. Highest-caliber career placement for our students into positions across the entire energy value chain