No description available.

This thesis investigates the effect of different design capacities on the economic return of a number or hypothetical offshore oilfields. In particular, it investigates the optimum design capacity of both a main field and a satellite field being produced over the main field platform. The optimum timing of first oil from the satellite field is also investigated.

Nigeria became a mono-product economy through its heavy reliance on crude oil for export and revenue. As a result of oil price volatility and the need to increase national revenue and public spending, the Nigerian government has adopted a policy of diversification to non-oil minerals. This study focuses on oil sands that are considered second only to oil in terms of economic potential. This policy also means that Nigeria is moving towards finite resource and a dirtier form of crude oil. A national analysis of non-oil mineral activity using a GIS indicates that exploration, mining and quarrying are widespread; a potentially positive outcome for national mineral development. The government however, is failing to take into account the impact of this activity on communities and ecosystems overlapping or lying proximal to mining licences. A case study indicates that oil sands exploitation can have a positive impact on the host communities through infrastructure development, which can trigger small businesses, job opportunities and increased income. Despite these benefits, there are fears of environmental degradation, displacements, loss of communal lands and means of livelihood. Already, the long delays in the development of oil sands are fuelling anger, deprivation, land grabs and pollution, and worst of all, ever-deeper underdevelopment of these „conditional resource communities’, which is aggravating the resource curse. For the oil sands projects to be feasible, beneficial and sustainable, Nigeria’s quest for resource wealth must integrate economic growth, social equity and ecological integrity at this planning stage. The thesis makes original contributions to determining resource communities and to the cumulative body of knowledge on the potential impacts of resource development on host communities in a rent-seeking economy like Nigeria.

The energy industry is transforming from the old, vertically integrated model into a more competitive model in which most companies are exposed to different types of risk. One of the major challenges facing energy companies is making investment decision-making associated with the prices of crude oils. Since 1973, crude oil price behaviour has become more volatile, which suggested that different forces were driving crude oil prices. One of the main factors in generating the behaviour of crude oil prices is the role performed by OPEC and non-OPEC crude oil producers. Several theoretical and empirical analyses suggested that the economics behind OPEC’s supply of crude oil is different than those of non-OPEC supply. This study investigates whether prices of OPEC crude oils and prices of non-OPEC crude oils share a common data-generating process. The study empirically tests oil price volatility of OPEC and non-OPEC crude oil prices using GARCH models. It also applies the Johansen Cointegration Model and the Engle-Granger Error Correlation Model (ECM) model to test the long – and short-term relationship between crude prices (OPEC and non-OPEC) and stock prices of different oil companies. Finally, a panel data approach using fixed and random effects is used to estimate the reaction of OPEC and non-OPEC crude oil prices to events and news items that could possibly affect oil supply and prices. The results obtained suggest that the behaviour of crude oil prices is not affected by OPEC or non-OPEC affiliation. This finding suggests that the international oil market is globally integrated market that is able to factor in any possible changes to supply behaviour of OPEC or non-OPEC producers.

This study aims to generate a more robust understanding of public attitudes regarding non-renewable natural resource markets. Employing a comparative-historical case study method, it analyzes three waves of widespread fear that swept the United States over the course of the twentieth century regarding an imminent, irreversible shortage of oil. Each of these periods of fear over oil supply availability coincided with a significant rise in the price of crude oil, only to be followed by a sudden collapse as new production came onstream in response to higher prices. The study utilizes process tracing and pattern matching techniques to examine the linkages between fundamental supply-demand conditions in the crude oil market, oil price movements, and expert predictions of and other public expressions of belief that oil in the United States would become scarcer and more expensive in the future. This dissertation’s core arguments contribute to existing theoretical debates in three ways. First, by providing a comparative historical portrait of cyclical patterns in public and expert beliefs regarding non-renewable resource availability and long-term price behavior, the study puts contemporary debates over the future of oil supply in historical perspective. It allows the rampant claims of, and widespread belief in, a global shortage of oil that have gained popularity over the last decade—most notably, in the so-called “peak oil” movement—to be situated within a broader chronological context. It also extends and deepens earlier historical work analyzing oil shortage scares in the United States, both in terms of their underlying dynamics and their effect on federal government policy relative to the oil industry. Second, the study establishes the link between fundamental supply-demand conditions in the oil market, generally reflected in oil prices, and the degree of media attention given to, and apparent public belief in, an imminent, irreversible shortage of oil in the United States over the course of the twentieth century. In so doing, it demonstrates the applicability of Shiller’s (2000, 2005) conceptualization of new era economic theory formation and popularization to observed phenomena in the oil market, but with a crucial difference. Rather than new era economic thinking taking the form of unbounded optimism about the future, in the case of the oil market new era thinking has tended to be manifested as the pessimistic belief that an impending, irreversible shortage of oil would lead to a long-term, even perpetual, rise in oil prices. The study suggests two modifications to the concept that enhance its greater explanatory leverage with regard to exhaustible resource markets: one, that often the new era predictions most widely cited during shortage scares were actually made prior to the boom in prices, to little fanfare, but subsequently deemed prophetic by new era proponents; and two, that the new era narratives often contained normative elements. Moral judgments—in particular, condemnation of the oil economy’s degradation of the natural environment—have often intertwined with predictions that the oil supply was more limited than widely believed and that prices were destined to continue rising. Third, the study demonstrates that the concept of narratives of decline, as described by Bennett (2001) and Lieber (2008), constitutes a powerful theoretical lens through which to understand trends in popular opinion with regard to non-renewable resource availability, and to asset prices more generally—a link that has heretofore gone unrecognized. It finds that a positive feedback loop tended to exist between popular fears of a new era of oil shortages, marked by a long-term rise in prices, and related narratives of the environmental and relative political-economic decline of the United States.