Tulane Students Tackle Energy Industry Challenges

This spring, Entergy Louisiana asked a team of Tulane Master of Management in Energy (MME) students in the A. B. Freeman School of Business to analyze its tree-trimming and vegetation program. In response, the students developed financial models for potential revenue streams and a proposed change to federal law that would classify the trimmings and vegetation as renewable fuel.

When the student team started on the task, faculty suggested examining whether those costs could be reclassified from operating expenses to capital expenditures, which would allow the regulated utility to earn a return on that expense.

The students went somewhere else entirely.

“They had this whole other idea about trying to get our vegetation clearing, the organic material, limbs and things like that which qualified as a clean fuel source, and to turn it into a revenue stream,” said Harry Barton, who served as assistant general counsel at Entergy Louisiana at the time and is now chief regulatory officer for Entergy New Orleans.

“That’s incredibly creative,” said Barton, who oversaw the students’ work. “It’s nothing anybody here has ever thought of in 100 years of running the business.”

In addition to developing the proposal to qualify the waste as a renewable fuel, the team created financial models for three potential paths: selling the chipped waste to a biofuel facility being built at the Port of South Louisiana; using the material to create biochar, a type of charcoal that’s made by heating organic materials; or creating green hydrogen from the biomass.

Claire Babin (B ’26), who came to the MME program after studying ecology and natural resources management at Louisiana State University and communicated with a member of Congress about the possibility of legislation reclassifying the power line trimmings as a renewable fuel, is proud of the work she and her classmates did on the Entergy project.

“We didn’t just choose this as a class project. We turned a stranded asset. We built the model,” said Babin who, after graduating in May, joined Callais Capital Management as an entrepreneur in residence and is developing her own coastal restoration venture, Beaux Terre, while also working with Sinkco Labs.

Barton said the students exceeded his expectations at every level.

“Their knowledge of the industry, both terminology and how it works in practice, is very impressive,” he said.

The Entergy project is just one example of how students in Tulane’s MME program spend their capstone semester of the one-year program. Through the MME’s Energy Industry Projects capstone course, as the class is known, teams of three to five students partner with energy firms to tackle pressing problems by building financial models, navigating regulatory questions and delivering ready-to-implement recommendations to company executives.

In the most recent semester of the program, students worked not only on vegetation management but also on analyzing electricity production on offshore oil platforms, researching carbon markets and exploring carbon capture and utilization, among other issues.

The Tulane Energy Institute launched the MME program in 2011. Today, cohorts approach 30 students and include recent graduates, career changers and working professionals. The program covers all forms of energy, from renewables and fossil fuels to nuclear power and batteries.

Pierre Conner, a professor of practice in finance in the Freeman School, is the executive director of the institute. He also created, manages and teaches the capstone course. With the help of colleagues and the 35-member Tulane Energy Institute Advisory Board, Conner also engages in the “very intensive process to recruit and vet” companies to participate in the program. He said the breadth of Tulane’s MME program is atypical.

At many universities, Conner said, energy education lives in engineering schools, focused on the technical side of how systems work. Tulane’s MME program, embedded in the Freeman School, approaches energy as an industry that is driven as much by finance, policy and strategy as by technology. Students are trained to move between those worlds, understanding not just how energy is produced but how projects are financed, regulated and brought to market.

“We are creating a very unique type of student, a student who can bridge the gap between the field and the balance sheet,” said Brent Rosen, assistant dean for corporate relations at the Freeman School.

Joseph Samaniego, senior project manager for experiential learning at the Freeman School, said students typically arrive uncertain of what they’ve signed up for.

“They kind of come in here and they don’t really know what they’re getting themselves into,” Samaniego said.

But by the end of the course, he said, their perspectives change entirely.

“They realize, ‘Oh, wow, I’m talking to a CEO, I’m talking to a CFO, I’m working on real problems,’” he said. “By the time the class ends, they are very appreciative. They actually did a project, and they can use this for their interviews.”

Learning in the field

When MME graduate Mike Berkowitz (B ’26) began his capstone, he had never heard of microturbines. Midway into his capstone with DCOR, the largest producer of oil and gas off the coast of California, he was standing on an oil platform in the Pacific Ocean reviewing whether plans for a microturbine to generate electricity on two of its platforms would work.

“No one gets to go to an offshore platform in California,” Berkowitz said. “There’s probably 1% of 1% in the energy industry alone that gets that kind of opportunity, and we got it.”

DCOR’s CEO Alan Templeton (B ’02) was direct about how he views the students’ output.

“The work they’re doing is real work. It’s not busywork,” Templeton said. “They’re doing the decision-making models, and we’re going to use those to determine whether we spend millions of dollars of capital on it or not.”

Templeton and his father William Templeton (A&S ’73, B ’73) are both Tulane alumni. The Templeton family has been instrumental in supporting the Energy Institute and strengthening experiential learning through the William M. Templeton Trading Center and the Future of Energy Forum.

Joe Chase, who graduated from the MME program in 2025 and now works as a financial planning analyst at DCOR, helped supervise the DCOR student team. He described what makes the capstone structure successful, comparing it to a three-legged stool.

“You have the company aspect of it, then you also have the professors that are there helping, and then the students,” Chase said. “I think that’s what makes this class so special. This class has the potential to change people’s lives.”

Berkowitz signed a contract before graduating this May to join NextEra Energy’s strategic initiatives group, where he will work on asset optimization for solar, wind and battery systems — work that closely mirrors what he did for his capstone.

Uncharted territory

At WhiteHawk Energy, students analyzed the ownership and economic frameworks governing carbon storage across Louisiana and built financial models for how companies might acquire carbon royalty interests from landowners. David Heikkinen (B ’98), WhiteHawk’s chief development officer and a Tulane alumnus who has hired more than 30 Tulane graduates at prior companies, said the students are impressive.

“The level of commitment has been higher, and the amount of effort commensurate with that is actually higher than I would have expected for this type of project,” Heikkinen said.

Michael Karl (B ’26), who came to the MME after starting down a pre-med path, said the experience of navigating real policy issues, including conversations with a former senior official in the Louisiana Office of Mineral Resources, was something no case study could have replicated.

“I know some other capstones don’t always get to work with real companies on issues that are happening in the space right now,” Karl said. “And being in New Orleans is really helpful in energy.”

Another team of MME students worked with Future Use of Energy in Louisiana (FUEL), a coalition of state universities, colleges, state agencies, industry and capital partners striving to establish Louisiana as the center of global energy innovation. Tulane plays a central role in this coalition, which is funded by a record-breaking $160 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation. That team worked to answer one of FUEL’s biggest questions: whether Louisiana could eventually support a functioning carbon credit marketplace through which companies can reduce emissions. Lacy McManus, FUEL’s director of workforce development, said the uncertainty itself became part of the lesson for students.

“I think they are so curious, they are so high energy, they’re willing to learn, they’re eager to lead and they’re ready to dive headfirst straight in,” McManus said of the MME students.

Graduate Francesca Feodorov (B ’26) said working on carbon markets for the state, without clear precedent, changed how she thinks and tested the limits of every tool available to the team, including AI.

“AI has advanced rapidly in speed, computation and pulling from existing data. But when there’s no precedent to draw from, it hits a wall,” she said. “We still used it as a brainstorming tool throughout the process but couldn’t rely on it when the problem had no existing framework.”

An asset on day one

Corporate leaders say that collaborating with students produces work they can use and gives them an extended look at students they may later want to hire. DCOR’s Alan Templeton sees the energy capstone as a model for how graduate education and industry should connect.

“This type of experiential learning is going to make these students so much more marketable, and an asset on the ground when they start, not a yearlong learning curve,” he said. “What Pierre and this group have done with the MME program is incredibly valuable to both the student and to their future employer.”

McManus said she sees the program as the perfect bridge between academic and industry work.

“I’m a huge personal proponent of project-based learning,” she said. “I think this is an excellent model of how it could and should be done.”