Resources and Energy最新文献

This paper considers the effects of underground gas storage in an integrated model of extraction, storage and distribution of a non-renewable resource. In addition to the provision of supply-security in cases of delivery shortfall, the installment of a storage unit for the resource may provide cost reducing production smoothing as demand fluctuates seasonally between trough and peak. In this paper we investigate social optimality w.r.t. production smoothing, both within the cycle of a year and over the span of several years until shut-down of operations.

The assumption of an initial fixed mineral stock is superfluous and wrong. User cost (resource rent) in mineral production is the present value of expected increases in development cost. It can be measured as the difference between in-ground market value and development cost, or estimated approximately from current development cost. For private or national-income accounting, mineral reserves should be treated as a renewable inventory. Adjustment for change in inventory may increase or decrease the income of a mineral producer, but an increase is more likely.

Energy demand, and in particular the demand for liquid fuels is only moderately growing despite the dramatic price reduction since the beginning of 1986. Different reasons are conceivable to explain this observation, e.g., irreversibility of technological progress, sluggish behaviour due to substantial adjustment costs and the expectation of another price increase in the near future. This paper addresses the last two points, in so far as adjustment costs and price expectations may explain the current market situation. The theoretical discussion confirms that the anticipation of future price increases dampens the current rate of demand increases and implies demand reductions prior to the actual price increase. However, the empirical application (transport sector) indicates that expectations (of another price increase in the future) may at best explain only a small fraction of the observed asymmetrical demand behaviour.

Energy price shocks are widely believed to have severe macroeconomic effects, although this conclusion is far from unanimous in the economics literature. An analysis of disaggregated industry data for four countries after each energy price shock in the 1970s reinforces doubts about the role of energy in these recessions. There was no similarity in the impact on output and employment across industries between the two recessions, and no consistent relationship between industry activity and energy intensity by industry. In addition, there is no evidence to support either the wage rigidity hypothesis or the capital obsolescence hypothesis as an explanation of the effect of energy price shocks on macroeconomic behavior.

For the past half century, the average cost of finding new oil in the lower 48 U.S. has increased in a non-linear fashion. The average cost of producing oil decreased then increased over the same period, with costs rising since the mid-1960s. These results indicate that the cost increasing effects of resource depletion have outweighed the cost decreasing effects of technological improvements in the two primary stages of the oil supply process. Finding and production costs are also highly correlated with the rate of effort expended in each stage, and short-run changes in the rate of effort drive average costs above or below the long-run trend. Previous models which ignored the interplay between short- and long-run effects on cost produced misleading results concerning the scarcity of crude oil in the U.S. The drilling boom of the early 1980s arrested the rate of decline in new additions to reserves, but the average costs associated with those additions were the highest on record. Attempts to sustain production in the lower 48 U.S. through massive drilling programs targeting the large number of undiscovered small fields and infill drilling in existing fields are likely to drive average costs even higher.

Since PURPA, there has been a significant increase in cogeneration and other forms of non-utility power production. However, under regulations implementing PURPA, prices paid to cogenerators in some states exceeded the rates these firms pay to the utilities and some cogeneration contracts were based on oil prices far in excess of prevailing oil prices. FERC and state regulators now take a more market-oriented perspective, including competitive bidding. A simple model of cogeneration economics is proposed and a decision rule is derived. The implications of the decision rule are examined in terms of how potential cogenerators would respond to pricing procedures based on competitive bidding.

The URAD system is the only comprehensive computerized database for information and estimates of the quantity of undiscovered uranium resources in the United States. The database includes subjective estimates of uranium endowment and geographic and geologic descriptions for approximately 700 area-specific assessments. The estimated quantity of undiscovered resources are represented in the form of probability distributions. This probabilistic approach makes the uncertainty about these resources explicit.

A simple re-formalization of Pindyck's classic model of the non-renewable resource exploringextracting firm permits one to see that the optimal exploration-extraction program is governed by a pure r% rule [Hotelling (1931)]. This fact has interesting implications for valuing resource extracting firms by ‘the Hotelling Valuation Principle’ and for valuing economic depreciation with exhaustible resources at the level of the firm and of the national economy.

Energy use patterns in industrial nations have gone through dramatic changes over the past 20 years. This paper offers a major advance in the methodology of structural decomposition analysis (SDA) and applies it to the determination of the relative prominence of various ‘sources’ of change in energy use in intermediate sectors of the U.S. economy between 1972–1982. These sources correspond to the pure form of input changes in the context of production theory. We derive a mutually exclusive and completely exhaustive set of estimating equations at the level of detail of the two-tier KLEM production function. It is our contention that these equations can yield as much insight as more elaborate and data-intensive approaches utilizing flexible functional forms. Our results indicate that the major sources of upward pressure on energy use were economic growth, KLEM substitution, and the joint effects of technological change, while the major sources of downward pressure were energy conservation and technological change in materials.

In updating input-output models using partial information from a new time period, it is important to know the relative contributions of model components in order to determine which new data lead to the greatest improvement in accuracy. In this work, using the standard energy input-output model, inverse coefficient change attributable to changes in the economy's direct energy requirements, direct non-energy requirements, and the composition of output within aggregate sectors is separated and measured. Results show that very accurate updated energy intensities can be estimated when updated direct energy flows and changes in the composition of output are accounted for.