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...

The future evolution of energy supply technologies strongly depends on (and affects) the economic and environmental systems, due to the high dependency of this sector on the availability and cost of fossil fuels, especially on the small regional scale. This paper aims at presenting the modeling...

This article presents an integrated assessment of climate change, air pollution, and energy security policy. Basis of our analysis is the MERGE model, designed to study the interaction between the global economy, energy use, and the impacts of climate change. For our purposes we expanded MERGE...

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...

The economics of CO2 capture and storage in relation to the possibility of significant leakage of CO2 from geological reservoirs once this greenhouse gas has been stored artificially underground will be among the main determinants of whether CCS can significantly contribute to a deep cut in...

This paper is the first to discuss the design of futures hedging strategies in European natural gas markets (NBP, TTF and Zeebrugge). A common feature of energy prices is that conditional mean and volatility are driven by seasonal trends due to weather, demand, and storage level seasonalities....

Urban water conservation is typically achieved through prescriptive regulations, including the rationing of water for particular uses and requirements for the installation of particular technologies. A significant shift has occurred in pollution control regulations toward market-based policies...

This paper provides a comparative analysis of statistical methods to evaluate the consumer perception about the quality of Services of General Interest. The evaluation of the service quality perceived by users is usually based on Customer Satisfaction Survey data and an ex-post evaluation is...

The research question addressed by this paper is a simple one: are European consumers happy with the services provided by the utilities after two decades of reforms? We focus on electricity, gas, water, telephone in the EU 15 Member States. The variables we analyse are consumers’ satisfaction...

Short-term auctions for access to entry terminals of the British gas-network appear to successfully allocate scarce resources and capture scarcity rent. Now long-term auctions are being introduced to guide future capacity expansion decisions. In our model the fraction of rights issued in the...