Energy

This paper provides an overview of the debate surrounding the Nabucco pipeline’s cancellation. Conventional wisdom holds that Nabucco failed for political reasons, but the real cause of its failure was the emergence of two more economically viable pipeline plans.

Stalling progress in European, Chinese and Latin American shale has been attributed to difficult geological formations and lacking data. Yet, ‘above ground’ factors matter in the extractive industries as much as geology. It is policies, regulation and institutional settings that determines the success or failure of a contested, risk bound technology such as fracking. This article suggests that a regulatory governance agenda may offer novel insights into shale gas as a policy phenomenon.

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.

The chapter discusses the EU as an actor in global energy, and shows that the EU – short of a strong set of policy tools – relies more than other players on exporting its own rules. It explores the areas in which the Commission is capable of exerting (regulatory) external power in the energy sector and assesses the Commission's actions with regards to the challenges facing the EU along the energy value chain: upstream, midstream and downstream.

In the year since Russia and China signed a landmark $400bn natural gas pact in May 2014, rapid developments in the energy sector and the geopolitical situation offer a chance to re-examine the deal. Indeed, the aftermath of the pact saw a return to a world of cheaper oil—a situation driven by a number of factors outside of Russia’s control. The buffeting winds of broadbrush western sanctions have deepened the uncertain fiscal outlook for Russia’s hydrocarbon-driven economy, calling its financial resilience into question.

This paper examines the domestic sources of the internationalization of national oil companies (NOCs) in China and India. It argues that—counter to notions of state-led internationalization—the going abroad of NOCs reflects a pattern of “coopetition,” i.e., the co-existence of cooperation and conflict between increasingly entrepreneurial NOCs and partially supportive and interventionist home governments.