• Energy Research

Liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects are regulated by host countries, but policy and regulation should depend on geography and meteorology. Without considering the role of geography and meteorology, sub-optimal design choices can result, leading to energy conversion efficiency and capital investment decisions that are less than ideal. A key step in LNG is regasification, which transforms LNG back from liquid to the gaseous state and requires substantial heat input. This study investigated different LNG regasification technologies used around the world and benchmarked location and meteorology-related factors, such as seawater temperatures, ambient air temperatures, wind speeds and relative humidity. Seawater vaporizers are used for more than 95% of locations subject to water quality. Ambient air conditions are relatively better for South America, India, Spain and other Asian countries (Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Thailand) and provide a much cleaner regasification technology option for natural and forced draft systems and air-based intermediate fluid vaporizers. On a global basis, cold energy utilization currently represents <1% of the total potential, but this approach could deliver nearly 12 Gigawatt (GW) per annum. Overall, climate change is expected to have a positive financial impact on the LNG regasification industry, but the improvement could be unevenly distributed.

With mounting concerns over energy security and climate change, natural gas has seen significant growth in demand during the last two decades. Natural gas has only half of the carbon footprint of coal and has consequently become an important transition fuel as the world economy shifts away from more carbon-intensive energy sources in favour of lower-carbon alternatives. As a result, a substantial amount of capital is being invested around the world to accelerate and create natural gas and liquefied natural gas (LNG) infrastructure. LNG has become the fastest-growing sector in the international gas trading business, but its promise as a transition fuel has been complicated by the rising capital costs associated with delivering LNG projects and infrastructure around the world. Towards shining a light on this problem, this paper offers an analysis of the capital costs of LNG regasification terminals in different regions and puts forward benchmarks in several key areas to show how these spending trends vary and may be interpreted. The investigation highlights the relative importance that decisions can have on capital investment costs in the earliest stages of a project, and sheds light on the factors that most significantly affect capital expenditure and have implications on gas price. Specifically, the analysis identifies two important variables that have the most significant impact on these capital costs: (1) the ratio of LNG storage volumes to gas send-out, and (2) the “economy of scale” factor, calculated here in reference to ratio of capital expenditure per millions of tonnes per annum of capacity.

Practitioners from both the upstream oil and gas industry and the space and satellite sector have repeatedly noted several striking similarities between the two industries over the years, which have in turn resulted in many direct comparisons in the media and industry press. The two sectors have previously worked together and shared ideas in ways that have yielded some important breakthroughs, but relatively little sharing or cross-pollination has occurred in the area of asset maintenance. This is somewhat surprising in light of the fact that here, too, the sectors have much in common. This paper accordingly puts forward the viewpoint that the upstream oil and gas industry could potentially make significant improvements in asset maintenance—specifically, with regard to offshore platforms and remote pipelines—by selectively applying some aspects of the maintenance strategies and philosophies that have been learned in the space and satellite sector. The paper then offers a research agenda toward accelerating the rate of learning and sharing between the two industries in this domain, and concludes with policy recommendations that could facilitate this kind of cross-industry learning.

The ability to forecast energy prices in the long-term is important for a wide range of reasons, from the formulation of countries' energy and transportation policies to the defensive strategies of nations to investment decisions within the private sector. Despite the importance of these predictions, however, forecasters and market pundits face a difficult challenge when trying to forecast over the long-term. While statistical models can credibly rely on assumptions about the relationship between variables in the short-term, they are frequently less reliable in the long-term as political and technological transformations profoundly change how the economy works over time. Towards improving long-term predictions for energy commodities, this paper uses the elicitation and aggregation of experts' beliefs to put forward forecasts for crude oil and natural gas prices by incentivizing experts to tell the truth and minimising their own biases through the application of the Bayesian Truth Serum. With this approach, we generated both short-term and long-term forecasts, and used the short-term forecast to validate the quality of the experts' predictions.

Cloud computing has significantly impacted a broad range of industries, but these technologies and services have been absorbed throughout the marketplace unevenly. Some industries have moved aggressively towards cloud computing, while others have moved much more slowly. For the most part, the energy sector has approached cloud computing in a measured and cautious way, with progress often in the form of private cloud solutions rather than public ones, or hybridized information technology systems that combine cloud and existing non-cloud architectures. By moving towards cloud computing in a very slow and tentative way, however, the energy industry may prevent itself from reaping the full benefit that a more complete migration to the public cloud has brought about in several other industries. This short communication is accordingly intended to offer a high-level overview of cloud computing, and to put forward the argument that the energy sector should make a more complete migration to the public cloud in order to unlock the major system-wide efficiencies that cloud computing can provide. Also, assets within the energy sector should be designed with as much modularity and flexibility as possible so that they are not locked out of cloud-friendly options in the future.

Abstract Signed in December 2015 by 194 countries, the Paris Climate Agreement laid a very encouraging foundation for global attempts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. While this was an important step for the global community, much work remains to be done. Based on climate change and technology scenarios developed by the International Energy Agency in the wake of the agreement, the World Bank has developed a set of projections about the amount and kind of feedstock materials that will be required to achieve these targets in the years ahead. So-called “technology minerals”—including metals like lithium and cobalt that are commonly found in rechargeable batteries, or tellurium that is used to make solar cells—figure prominently. An important aspect of the Paris Agreement is the need for the world economy to shift away from fossil fuels towards green energy networks based on stored electricity and renewable energy sources. But achieving the agreement's ambitious goals will necessarily require dramatic increases in global production rates for technology minerals that are far beyond current levels. Despite the urgent need for these feedstock materials, however, the mineral supply sector is not on track to satisfy anywhere near this demand. To put the industry and its supporting institutions on a path more likely to deliver these vital materials, this paper recommends a more integrated, global, system-wide approach to managing the organizations behind technology minerals: the Smart Mineral Enterprise Development (SMED) framework.

With only half of the carbon footprint of coal, natural gas is widely considered to be an important transition fuel as the world economy shifts away from more carbon-intensive energy sources towards lower-carbon alternatives. Liquefied natural gas (LNG) has accordingly grown as a solution for connecting producers and consumers of this valuable resource that are geographically separated by large distances or barriers that make pipelines infeasible. Many construction projects are underway or being planned around the world to bring onstream the vast amounts of infrastructure required for this strategically important energy source. Despite the importance of these projects, however, they are frequently plagued by significant overruns in both scheduling and cost that could impede the progress of the adoption of natural gas in both the short- and long-term. Towards understanding these impediments, this paper puts forward a systematic literature review that synthesizes project management research and prior contributions in the LNG domain to identify risk factors that are most important to schedule and cost overruns in LNG projects. We then put forward a series of research questions that highlight the most fruitful areas for future investigations in this area, thereby helping to lay the groundwork for research that would potentially speed up the rate at which new natural gas supplies can supplant more carbon-intensive fuel sources around the world. Keywords: Liquefied natural gas, LNG, Schedule overruns, Upstream, Risk factors

The forces of digital transformation have delivered significant benefits like sustainable development and economic growth in a range of early adopter industries such as retail and manufacturing but, despite these potential benefits, the resource and energy sectors have been relative latecomers to digitalization simply because they are frequently slower to absorb new technologies. Here we present the results of a systematic literature review identifying the ways in which digital technologies have been applied in the oil and gas, mining, and energy domains. We applied content and descriptive analysis to evaluate and discuss 151 academic articles selected from the Scopus database. Two particularly interesting trends emerge from the analysis. First, over 75% of the papers were about the energy sector excluding the oil & gas industry, and only a small minority were from the mining or oil & gas sectors. Second, the most frequently discussed objective of digital transformation was the reduction of operational expenses. By surveying the different ways in which these innovations have been used in these industries and identifying trends and patterns in how digital technologies have been applied, the findings of this review deepen our understanding of the current state of digital technologies within the resource and energy sectors and, in so doing, shine a useful amount of light on the contributions that digital transformation has made to businesses in these sectors. This paper also highlights for future scholars, practitioners, and policymakers the six research areas that they should focus on in the future to help the resource and energy sectors accelerate the digital transformation process and improve their ability to deliver value with these innovations.