Articles

As the window of opportunity to avert dangerous climate change closes, the authors argue that we urgently need to take stock of government initiatives that accelerate innovation in energy technologies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. What works and why?

In order to make R&D funding decisions to meet particular goals, such as mitigating climate change or improving energy security, or to estimate the social returns to R&D, policy makers need to combine the information provided in this study on cost reduction potentials with an analysis of the macroeconomic implications of these technological changes. The authors conclude with recommendations for future directions on energy expert elicitations.

This article considers a number of political explanations for gas policy and shows that it is usually the economic interests of big energy firms that frequently take precedence, although these are often ignored and hidden as factors.

Ever since the 1973 oil embargo, and especially since the Russian-Ukrainian gas crisis of 2006, Western policy makers have paid a great deal of attention to energy security. Yet there is no consensus as to what energy security is, what methodologies are most useful for conceptualizing and operationalizing the term, or even whether it is possible to generalize about anything as complex and contextually dependent as energy security. This enormous diversity of theoretical, methodological, and epistemological perspectives on the study of energy security complicates any assessment of the state of the field. It is, however, precisely because ‘energy security’ is such an elusive concept that academics, statesmen, and analysts of energy politics should not strive to coalesce around one precise definition.

Gazprom, Russian's prime state owned gas producer, is facing severe pressure stemming from international gas market dynamics, EU regulation and the Ukraine crisis. Slowing gas demand coupled with shifting pricing models and a persisting transit issue pose significant challenges for Gazprom's business going forward.

Existing studies show that, on average, national champions in energy-rich states tend to ‘stick around’ by maintaining strong links with their respective governments in the distribution of rents. Yet the foundations of preference formation—the particular role of national champions, their relationship to their respective governments and a limited number of third suppliers in that process—have neither been theorised nor investigated empirically in countries that are net importers of gas.

The upstream renaissance in the United States that has resulted from the successful application of new technologies in the exploration and development of shale gas has generated ripples through the global gas market. The US is soon to become a significant exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG), which is remarkable given conventional wisdom just a decade ago was that the US would become a substantial importer of LNG.

This article investigates the European Commission's external energy policy through the lens of the regulatory state. It argues that because of the nature of its institutions, policy tools and resources, the Commission remains a liberal actor even as the world leaves the benign pro-market environment of the 1990s and becomes more mercantilist – or ‘realist’.

The story of Bulgarian shale gas exemplifies the difficulty for the unconventional gas industry to take a hold in Europe. This paper investigates the reasons for Bulgaria banning shale gas by disentangling the various domestic causes at work.

In the past few years the gas sector has experienced a wave of unprecedented changes. The increasing globalization of gas markets and the technological breakthrough of shale gas production in the United States have triggered deep changes in Eurasian gas market governance.