China is appraised to have the world's largest exploitable reserves of shale gas, although several legal, regulatory, environmental and investment-related issues will likely restrain its scope. China's capacity to successfully face these hurdles and produce commercial shale gas will have a...

We introduce endogenous investments for increasing conventional and non-conventional oil extraction capacity in the integrated assessment model WITCH. The international price of oil emerges as the Nash equilibrium of a non-cooperative game. When carbon emissions are not constrained, oil is used...

MIND is a hybrid model incorporating several energy related sectors in an endogenous growth model of the world economy. This model structure allows a better understanding of the linkages between the energy sectors and the macro-economic environment. We perform a sensitivity analysis and...

Two stylized backstop systems with endogenous technological learning formulations (ETL) are introduced in MERGE: one for the electric and the other for the non-electric markets. Then the model is applied to analyze the impacts of ETL on carbon-mitigation policy, contrasting the resulting impacts...

This paper applies real options theory to establish an overseas oil investment evaluation model that is based on Monte Carlo simulation and is solved by the Least Squares Monte-Carlo method. To better reflect the reality of overseas oil investment, our model has incorporated not only the...

In this paper, we use stochastic dynamic programming to model the choice of a municipality which has to design an optimal waste management program under uncertainty about the price of recyclables in the secondary market. The municipality can, by undertaking an irreversible investment, adopt a...

In Italy and in many EU countries, the last decade was characterized by a large development of distributed generation power plants. Their presence determined new critical issues for the design and management of the overall energy system and the electric grid due to the presence of discontinuous...

Drawing on the real-options theory we analyse bidding behaviour in a sealed-bid-first-score procurement auction where suppliers, facing variable production costs, must simultaneously report the contract price and the cost level at which they intend to perform the project. We show that this award...

Uncertainty plays a key role in the economics of climate change, and the discussions surrounding its implications for climate policy are far from settled. We give an overview of the literature on uncertainty in integrated assessment models of climate change and identify some future research...

In a continuous-time framework we study the technology and investment choice problem of a continuous co-digestion biogas plant dealing with randomly fluctuating relative convenience of input factor costs. Input factors enter into the productive process together mixed according to a given initial...