Power Players

Stand anywhere in Texas and you’re never far from a reminder of how the modern world is powered.

Pumpjacks and turbines, pipelines and refineries, reactors and gas stations, substations and transmission lines—these industrial sculptures dot our horizons, linking oil fields to trading floors, wind farms to family businesses, power plants to homes, fueling the aspirations of our global economies.

But behind the energy hardscape lies something just as essential and far less visible: a legal architecture, a foundation of contracts, permits, easements, regulations, joint ventures, royalty arrangements, and financing structures—the legal framework that makes energy possible.

No turbine spins, no pipeline flows, no gigawatt of power courses toward an AI data center, much less powers your smartphone or heats your home, without a robust legal infrastructure.

In an increasingly electrified and digitized global economy, energy law isn’t a specialty—it’s a cornerstone of civilization. And at Texas Law, the now 20-year-old Texas Journal of Oil, Gas, and Energy Law (TJOGEL) has emerged as the proving ground for the legal minds that will define this century’s energy future.

Visionaries

When it comes to energy, Texans are preternaturally optimistic.

Born during one the most economically devastating oil busts in Texas history, Nicholas Franklin ’07 and Brandon Seale ’08 had good reason to pursue careers in anything other than energy. Franklin’s family relocated from Booker, Texas—just three miles south of the Oklahoma border—to Amarillo in the 1980s when oil prices hit rock bottom and decimated his hometown’s economy. Seale’s family made their way from Abilene to San Antonio in 1987 as jobless rates in Texas, particularly in the Permian Basin, exceeded 10%.

But both Franklin and Seale under­stood something of the essence of energy. “It’s the universal currency,” says Seale.

“People forget that Texas suffered double-digit unemployment for almost a decade following the oil price collapse of the 1980s. Despite all that, when it came time for me to get a job, I was drawn back to the fundamental nobility of the energy business—the idea of producing something that everybody needs and uses.”

For Franklin, “No one from my county had graduated from law school since the 1980s. I expected to return to the panhandle, partly because I knew there was a shortage of attorneys, and the most successful practices seemed to be those specializing in oil and gas law.” Perhaps more pragmatic than Seale’s philosophical sense of energy, Franklin and Seale share the innate entrepreneurial spirit that’s made Texas a global energy leader.

That spirit took off in the early 20th century and, not surprisingly, Texas Law faculty were leading the way.

More Than A Journal

And yet, for all that history, Texas Law lacked one thing: a student-run energy law journal. That changed in 2005 when a group of enterprising 1Ls—more self-described “misfits” than polished journal aspirants—created one from scratch.

The prospect of a new journal was daunting. The law school already had 12 journals, many struggling financially. Dean Bill Powers, who would become university president the following year, was skeptical. He memorably told Seale that most new journal efforts were “like drag racing and teenage sex: short-lived and vastly over-hyped.”

Undeterred, Seale and Franklin, along with Cynthia Martinez ’07 and Amy Maxwell ’07 began modestly: an energy law society. But when 50 students showed up to a meeting where 15 were expected, the group realized the interest was there—it just needed structure.

Martinez, who had a passion for extending energy law beyond oil and gas to renewables, secured the endorsement of Professor Smith, the Rex G. Baker Centennial Chair in Natural Resources Law. Smith’s credibility opened doors that would have otherwise been shut. “You have Professor Smith onboard? Yes? Then we are on board,” was the oft-repeated response from lawyers and firms, other law schools, and members of state government.

Additionally, they knew how to raise money. Maxwell had a politician’s Rolodex and fundraising sense to match. She secured an initial $6,000 from “a couple of good old guys from Kilgore, Texas,” she reports, and eventually lined up $30,000 in annual funding.

With Smith’s endorsement and funding in hand, TJOGEL launched with what Franklin describes as “catalytic bigness”— build big or lose everything. In April 2006, they printed 4,000 copies of their first issue, making it the second-largest distribution of any law journal behind only Harvard Law Review. The gamble paid off.

A Talent Pipeline

Today, TJOGEL functions less like a traditional law review and more like a legal talent pipeline fueling one of the world’s most critical industries.

If the 1980-90s oil bust had left a generational gap of legal talent, TJOGEL began filling the need for lawyers fluent in both the business and regulatory complexities of energy development. They serve as general counsels for major energy companies, partners leading renewable energy practice groups at top firms, regulatory officials shaping state and federal policy, and executives building the infrastructure that powers modern life. TJOGEL alumni aren’t just practicing energy law—they’re defining it.

Seale, editor-in-chief of Volume 2, went on to help develop the Nueva Era pipeline—200 miles of 30-inch steel connecting Texas to Monterrey, Mexico. The project required attorneys from four cities across two countries. At the center sat Seale, managing what he calls “air traffic control” for a permitting and regulatory process that Mexico had never before attempted. Today, the pipeline delivers enough natural gas to power three million homes in Mexico.

Becky Diffen ’09, Volume 4 editor-in-chief and an adjunct professor at Texas Law, co-authored in TJOGEL’s pages the definitive article on wind law while still a student. That 2009 article became the foundation for Texas Wind Law, later expanded to Wind and Solar Law, now the go-to academic text in the field.

“Texas has been at the forefront,” Diffen says, sitting in her office overlooking an Austin skyline increasingly punctuated by renewable energy company logos. “We were the first state with a real renewable portfolio standard. But to build that out, you needed the CREZ transmission lines,” she notes about the $7 billion network of power lines that opened West Texas wind to urban markets.

CREZ, short for Competitive Renewable Energy Zones, reflects “years of work at the Public Utility Commission, just as I was coming out of law school,” explains Diffen, work that required translating oil and gas legal concepts to an entirely new energy resource. Can landowners sever a wind estate like mineral rights? How do trespass laws apply to turbulence? What happens when the wind stops blowing across your neighbor’s property and onto yours?

“It’s different from oil and gas,” Diffen notes, “but the real property foundations definitely evolved out of Texas O&G law.”

While Diffen was pioneering renewable law, Martinez—Managing Editor Volume 1—was building the companies themselves. She spent two decades scaling multiple renewable energy companies, most recently serving as general counsel for Total Renewable Energies. Her specialty: the multi-billion-dollar offshore wind projects that require decade-long partnerships between private developers and federal agencies.

“The challenge of new energy sources is that you’re writing the playbook as you go,” Martinez says. “Lawyers aren’t just risk mitigators—we’re engineers of the possible. Our job is to create structures that make the finance, technology, and regulation line up for safe and abundant energy.” That creative mindset—what Martinez calls “the Department of How”—echoes the scrappy origins of TJOGEL itself.

The Collision of AI and Energy

Given the first quarter of this century, that Department-of-How thinking is going to be in high demand. The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects global electricity demand could increase by about one-third to three-quarters by 2050, far outpacing the world’s ability to meet that demand.

One driver in the developed world, though certainly not the only one, is AI. “We are manufacturing intelligence, and just like manufacturing cars requires steel mills and manufacturing airplanes requires aluminum smelters, manufacturing intelligence requires enormous amounts of energy,” says Franklin, the panhandle lawyer who now directs AI initiatives for Meta.

The exponential pace of artificial intelligence—and its power-hungry data centers—is on a collision course with the geologic pace of energy infrastructure. The bottlenecks are not technical brilliance or capital markets. The constraint will be the same one that has defined every major energy project for the past century: the legal and regulatory framework that determines what gets built where, when, and how.

This is where the tech world discovers what energy companies have known for generations: the most sophisticated technology in the world still moves at the speed of permits. The companies that learn to navigate this reality first will define the future of AI.

This inflection point arrives precisely when TJOGEL’s network effects reach critical mass. Twenty years of alumni placement means legal energy expertise now resides across the country in major law firms, regulatory agencies, and corporate boardrooms. They have been navigating that temporal mismatch of fast-moving business and the constraints of regulation for two decades and now find themselves positioned at the center of the most important technological transition of their careers.

If past experience is any guide, TJOGEL alumni will be drawing on the precedents of those who came before, thinking in analogies about the new challenges facing them, and trailblazing the solutions for that future.

“This is just the beginning,” says Franklin. TJOGEL and Texas Law are not just producing energy lawyers. These lawyers will shape the legal infrastructure of America’s energy future. These are the architects powering the vast possibilities of tomorrow.

Before he graduated in 1992, Eric Drummond had one area of law he knew he wanted to avoid: administrative law. Drummond chuckles as he considers the irony of how life worked out. “I’ve had a 30-year career in complex administrative law,” he said. Today, that background is helping him guide fusion energy advancements through to commercialization, a Herculean and complex effort. If successful, the teams Drummond invests in, shepherds, and builds may just solve one of this century’s most pressing needs: abundant energy.

As global energy needs grow, the hunt for abundant energy that is cheap, reliable, and clean remains urgent. Current sources—from fossil fuels to renewables—check two or three of the boxes; none comes close to checking all four. But there’s one that might.

Nuclear fusion—replicating the sun’s reaction by forcing atoms together to throw off heat in the process—just might be the energy solution we’ve long been seeking. And for Drummond, an entrepreneur, investor, and founder of Innovation Corridor, a technology acceleration platform, he’s betting on cutting-edge technology to meet the practical demands of commercializing fusion.

Fresh out of Texas Law, Drummond joined an Austin law firm and was thrown into a career-defining project: the merger of two electric utility holding companies that became the largest public utility holding company in the United States. The deal encompassed four states, complex financing, and nuclear energy. The skills Drummond developed navigating that deal—understanding regulatory frameworks, coordinating diverse interests, and managing complex financing structures—are the same ones he’s using to see fusion technology through its commercialization phase.

Energy Gain

Fusion energy has long been more science experiment than practical technology. But after decades of dashed hopes and perpetual delay, “[t]he scientific hurdles have been met,” Drummond contends. “We’re now at the point where it’s beyond just the research.”

Today’s commercial nuclear plants all rely on fission—splitting atoms apart to generate heat, which in turn boils water to make steam that powers turbines and generates electricity. By comparison, fusion reactions can produce as much as four times more energy than fission.

But recreating the sun’s reaction on Earth requires even higher temperatures than the sun itself—as much as 100 million degrees Celsius. At this extreme heat, atoms become ionized, creating the plasma of charged particles moving at high speeds necessary for fusion. Maintaining plasma stability at such high temperatures is difficult.

In an increasingly dynamic synergy, even as AI requires more electricity, it and other advances in supercomputing are enabling increasingly sophisticated plasma modeling and control systems needed for plasma stability.

“You have the scientific breakthroughs that are a matter of physics driven by our high-performance, supercomputing abilities to model it, simulate it,” Drummond said. “All these things have come together in a way that’s enormously productive in the last 36 to 48 months.”

With increased computing power, fusion energy researchers recently jumped the fundamental hurdle of energy production: energy gain—producing more energy from reactions than goes into starting them. For decades, fusing atoms took too much energy on the front end to make it a viable power source. But in December 2022, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility achieved energy gain from fusion, a feat that former Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm declared “a landmark achievement.”

Fusion’s Promise

Since the breakthrough, global funding for fusion has increased by about $4.2 billion, much of it from private investment. The potential market has led to a rash of fusion startups and the initial creation of a power plant supply chain. About 45 companies worldwide are developing the technology, and 25 of them are in the United States.

Some of the largest U.S. companies are placing big bets on fusion. Google recently pledged to buy 200 mega watts—enough electricity to power 200,000 homes—from a fusion plant that won’t be completed for a decade. And Microsoft has agreed to buy electricity from a fusion plant scheduled for deployment in 2028.

It’s easy to see why fusion is so captivating. Apart from producing more energy than fission, fusion reactions also produce no carbon or radioactive waste. Fusion generation, because it is stable, can support highly variable renewables on the grid, a reliability appealing to leaders from both sides of the political divide.

The Department of Energy under both Presidents Biden and Trump has encouraged public-private partnerships with fusion energy companies. During the past legislative session, Texas lawmakers earmarked $350 million in taxpayer-funded grants —more than any other state—for advanced nuclear projects. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott vowed to make Texas “the global leader in advanced nuclear power.”

Critical for public acceptance, fusion avoids the safety risks associated with nuclear plants. There’s no nuclear waste and no chance of Chernobyl- or Fukushima-style accidents. “You don’t have to worry about meltdowns or runaway reactions because if you turn off the fusion, it just stops immediately,” explains Dr. Michael Webber, an engineering and policy professor at UT Austin. “It has built-in safety.”

Not Yet Cheap

Despite the private and public interest, affordability remains a challenge. Electricity generated from fusion costs an estimated $9,700 per kilowatt hour compared with $1,300 for wind and as little as $950 for combined-cycle natural gas plants.

That isn’t likely to change even if fusion achieves commercial development. Projections show fusion reactors will remain as much as five times more costly to build than solar and wind power for years to come.

Proponents argue longevity: fusion plants are expected to remain operational for 50 years, compared with about 20 years for renewable installations, a factor that may help overcome higher initial costs.

Costs could also come down with scaling and time, Drummond said. For transformative technologies to reach market scale, they will require “ecosystem building,” a process Drummond describes as coordinating the participation among national laboratories, private companies, financial institutions, regulatory agencies, and political leaders. This systems-thinking approach has become increasingly important as fusion moves from pure research toward commercial deployment.

Coming Together

Fusion’s potential scratches the itch of various factions today, from climate goals to energy independence and technological leadership, transcending partisan divisions. “It has industrial applications that might replace fossil fuels in certain hard-to-decarbonize industrial sectors,” notes Professor David Spence, who teaches energy, administrative and environmental law. “So, on the left, there might be some enthusiasm for fusion, and President Trump seems to have enthusiasm for it. So perhaps it’s one of those rare issues that can unite us.”

If it can, the prospects are enticing. With some companies predicting commercial plants as early as 2031, fusion energy could become an $80 billion industry by 2035.

After decades of speculation, perhaps more than just atoms are finally coming together to make nuclear fusion a reality in a power-hungry world. 

Editor’s Note: Thanks to Nicholas Franklin and Brandon Seale for their research and reporting on the history of TJOGEL.