Award Winning Inter-Disciplinary Energy Thinking

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My work focuses on how the global energy system hangs together. I focus on the glue - the 'in-between' that makes energy projects and energy policies work. I use this glue to propose solutions for the most pressing problems in the ongoing energy transition. To understand this glue requires an inter-disciplinary legal, techno-commercial, financial, policy, historical and political economy understanding of how the global energy system works. In my work, I bring these different perspectives together to provide a better analysis for how to solve global energy problems.

The key theme that runs through my work is other regard. In energy projects and energy value chains, we work together to diversify risks and opportunities. For energy projects and value chains to work, parties need to be able to trust that these risk assignments will be heeded - and that, at the outset, they leave room for every participant to have a reasonable opportunity to benefit from the value chain or project. Other regard here means to enforce the risk assignments as negotiated to protect the value chain as a whole against the perils of hindsight and second guessing. My award winning work on the scope and limits of contractual good faith in international commerce highlights this aspect of energy governance.

What is more, all participants in the global energy systems are neighbors in a shared resource community even when they are not contract partners - each can be successful in claiming their own part in the global energy system because the global energy system is a collective enterprise between all of its stakeholders. They hold correlative rights. These correlative rights set the baseline that allow each stakeholder to pursue their own individual opportunity within the shared resource space. Correlative rights transform the sum of individual opportunities into a common good. My work on the content and limits of correlative property and sovereign rights in shared resources spaces highlights this second aspect of energy governance. 

An inter-disciplinary understanding of other regard is not a matter of metaphysics or 'let's just get along' collectivism. It is an imperative that fuels hard nosed energy competition in shared Texas oil and gas reservoirs as much as it defines global energy contests between the U.S. and China. Without other regard -- without well spacing rules and the enforcement of contractual obligations -- competition between energy stakeholders becomes increasingly wasteful. Such energy waste cannot be tolerated if we want to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the current energy transition and decarbonization of incumbent energy infrastructure and systems.