Essays on carbon policy and enhanced oil recovery.

详细信息   

• 作者：Cook ; Benjamin R.
• 学历：Ph.D.
• 年：2011
• 导师：Phillips, Owen R.,eadvisorPhillips, Owen R.ecommittee memberMenkhaus, Dale J.ecommittee membervan 't Veld, Klaasecommittee memberAadland, David M.ecommittee memberShaffer, Sherrill L.ecommittee member
• 毕业院校：University of Wyoming
• Department：Economics & Finance
• ISBN：9781124626864
• CBH：3454010
• Country：USA
• 语种：English
• FileSize：4805119
• Pages：240

文摘

The growing concerns about climate change have led policy makers to consider various regulatory schemes designed to reduce the stock and growth of atmospheric CO2 concentrations while at the same time improving energy security. The most prominent proposals are the so called "cap-and-trade" frameworks which set aggregate emission levels for a jurisdiction and then issue or sell a corresponding number of allowances to emitters. Typically, these policy measures will also encourage the deployment of carbon capture and storage CCS) in geological formations and mature oil fields through subsidies or other incentives. The ability to store CO 2 in mature oil fields through the deployment of CO2 enhanced oil recovery CO2--EOR) is particularly attractive as it can simultaneously improve oil recovery at those fields, and serve as a possible financial bridge to the development of CO2 transportation infrastructure. The purpose of this research is to explore the impact that a tandem subsidy-tax policy regime may have on bargaining between emitters and sequestration providers, and also to identify oil units in Wyoming that can profitably undertake CO 2--EOR as a starting point for the build-out of CO2 pipelines. In the first essay an economics lab experiment is designed to simulate private bargaining between carbon emitters such as power plants) and carbon sequestration sites when the emitter faces carbon taxes, sequestration subsidies or both. In a tax-subsidy policy regime the carbon tax or purchased allowances) can be avoided by sequestering the carbon, and in some cases the emitter can also earn a subsidy to help pay for the sequestration. The main policy implications of the experiment results are that the sequestration market might be inefficient, and sequestration providers seem to have bargaining power sufficient to command high prices. This may lead to the integration of CO2 sources and sequestration sites, and reduced prices for the injectable CO2 purchased by oil operators for enhanced oil recovery. The second essay extends the CO2--EOR economic model described in a recent Energy Journal article by Klaas van t Veld and Owen R. Phillips 2010). This essay takes a Monte Carlo approach to the economic scoping model which focuses more directly on the probabilistic outcomes for each individual oil field-reservoir combination FRC). Using data on Wyoming oil fields the essay analyzes 197 FRCs in order to identify oil units with robust CO2--EOR profit potential over a wide range of uncertainty regarding future oil prices and reservoir characteristics. Of the 197 FRCs considered, 93 of them are found to meet an industry threshold IRR of 20 percent in at least half of scenarios with limited chance of actually taking losses. The third essay continues to employ the CO2--EOR economic scoping model, but focuses on Wyomings aggregate EOR potential and attendant CO2 requirements. A similar Monte Carlo analysis is used to construct incremental oil "supply" and cumulative CO2 purchase "demand" curve estimates. Finally, the study uses a resampling technique similar to bootstrapping in order to create probabilistic distributions of Wyomings aggregate EOR potential by assigning probabilities to individual oil prices. Although the data only covers oil fields with at least 5 MMbo of production, the analysis suggests around 768 MMbo of additional oil is likely to be recovered with CO2--EOR utilizing roughly 5.5 Tcf of injectable CO2.