New research by public policy think tank The Australia Institute shows that 26 out of Australia’s 37 universities have financial links to fossil fuel companies.
The new report, ‘Fossil-fuelled universities’, sought to examine and publicise the extent to which fossil fuel companies are involved in Australian universities.
According to The Australia Institute, 26 Australian universities have links to fossil fuel companies through scholarships and grants, funded graduate programs, internships, and academic positions. Fossil fuel company names adorn university buildings, school, and research centres.
“Coal and gas companies should not be funding science in the 2020s,” said Rod Campbell, research director at The Australia Institute.
Maybe the most notable such partnership is the one between Monash University and Woodside Energy, Australia’s largest domestic gas producer.
Monash signed a partnership with Woodside in 2016 – the same year the university also promised to divest from fossil fuels.
Since then, the collaboration – billed as a “major research partnership … to progress energy solutions for a lower carbon future” – has expanded to create the Woodside-Monash FutureLab (since changed to Monash FutureLab).
The partnership has also yielded the Woodside Building for Technology and Design, where Monash “students and researchers can embrace innovation, design, and cutting-edge technology to develop new solutions in sustainable energy technology.”
The naming rights to university buildings is not all that Woodside has secured through its partnership with Monash University.
According to The Australia Institute, Monash hosted an exclusive conference with Woodside at the university’s campus in Tuscany, Italy, which featured gas industry executives, Monash staff, and at least one politician. (The report referenced the results of an investigation published in June by Drilled.)
But Monash University is by no means the only university to secure fossil fuel funding to support research centres, with the report identifying 24 across 19 different universities.
Again, however, many of these research centres are specifically targeting ways to accelerate the transition to net-zero through a variety of research streams.
Other research centres highlighted in the report include the Menzies School of Health and Research at Charles Darwin University which is partnered with Japanese oil company Inpex, but which works in partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, their health services, and communities, on public health and health research.
There are also grant programs such as the Australian Coal Association Research Program (ACARP) which exalts in the fact that it is fully “owned and funded by all Australian black coal producers through a five cents per tonne levy paid on saleable coal.”
According to the Program’s website, the research supported includes “all aspects of the production and utilisation of black coal including health, safety, and the environment.”
The findings of TAI’s report follows nearly 20 years after a similar report the think tank published in 2007 which explored “the increasingly close relationships between Australian universities and the fossil fuel industries” and asked whether Australia’s universities were being “captured”.
The report authors asked whether fossil fuel companies were “gaining an inappropriate level of influence” over the teaching and research priorities of universities and if academic freedom was being jeopardised and if the relationships were “threatening to bring universities into disrepute.”
The new report finds that the fossil fuel industry also provides funding through the Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Program which is designed to promote “national and international research partnerships between researchers and business, industry, community organisations and other publicly funded research agencies”.
According to TAI, $12.2 million in ARC Linkage grants were awarded to university researchers between 2020 and 2025 who in turn partnered with fossil fuel companies including Santos, BHP, Arrow Energy, ExxonMobil, Woodside, Chevron, Shell, and Beach Energy.
Similarly, at least 20 scholarships covering costs such as tuition fees and living expenses for students are backed by funding from fossil fuel companies and sometimes come with additional benefits such as professional development and mentorship programs or guaranteed employment after graduation.
Fossil fuel companies also sponsor academic positions, “typically providing financial support directly to a university to establish and maintain a specific academic role or funding the salary and research expenses of an academic within a university department or research centre.”
And, current and former fossil fuel industry executives populate the governance of Australia’s universities.
According to the report’s authors, the myriad ways which the fossil fuel industry is intertwined with Australia’s universities serves to both compromise the integrity of research conducted at those universities, as well as undermine their independence, impartiality, and credibility.
They say the influence that the fossil fuel industry has over Australian universities is similar in many ways to the relationship that used to exist between universities and tobacco companies.
But the tobacco influence had been scrubbed from Australia’s universities by the early part of this century, so much so that some funding opportunities are contingent on researchers not accepting funding from the tobacco industry.
“Australia will not fund researchers who receive support from the tobacco industry,” the report concludes. “This successful anti-tobacco strategy could be used as the basis of a policy to end the connection between researchers and the fossil fuel industry.”
“Fossil fuel companies causing climate change in the 21st century are buying influence with Australia’s leading research organisations, just like tobacco companies bought off medical researchers last century,” added Campbell.
“Students know this and want universities to stop cosying up to big gas and coal companies.
“Gas companies made $170 billion over the last four years, selling gas that the Australian government gave them for free. The simple policy fix is to tax the gas industry and properly fund universities.
“Australia’s universities are under fire for various governance failures. Links with coal and gas companies are just the latest demonstration that universities are selling their integrity and selling it cheap.”
*This article has been amended to remove TAI claims that Monash University’s Monash Energy Institute is backed by funding from Woodside. A spokesperson from Monash advised that the Institute currently has no funding from Woodside and absolutely no partnership with Woodside.
