This paper discusses the rising profile of natural gas in global energy, factors constraining its further development, the gas contracting process, and the absence of a global market, which is analyzed in the context of the economic rent in the gas price and the opaque nature of gas contracts. A...

Starting in 2005, nontax revenue in Georgia is expected to rise significantly, in the form of transit fees for oil transported through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Oil Pipeline. Transit fees for gas transported through the South Caucasus Pipeline are expected to start in 2007. This paper discusses...

Wide employment of CO2 capture and storage (CCS) technology is of great importance to the sustainable development of China thanks to its contributions to climate change mitigation. Considering the fact that coal accounts for over 65% in the primary energy consumption mix of China, commensurate...

The paper presents a technique for detection of “bottlenecks” in gas transportation networks in emergency situations. The described approach makes it possible to formulate the optimal ways to tackle negative consequences for gas consumers. The technique is based on the “Oil and Gas”...

Mathematicians and engineers have developed in a joint research project a solution approach for performing simultaneous structural and design variable optimization in the design of cost-effective complex energy conversion systems. The paper presents a methodology and an application to the design...

The rank function rank(.) is neither continuous nor convex which brings much difficulty to the solution of rank minimization problems. In this paper, we provide a unified framework to construct the approximation functions of rank(.), and study their favorable properties. Particularly, with two...

McCormick (Math Prog 10(1):147–175, <CitationRef CitationID="CR23">1976</CitationRef>) provides the framework for convex/concave relaxations of factorable functions, via rules for the product of functions and compositions of the form <InlineEquation ID="IEq1"> <EquationSource Format="TEX">$$F\circ f$$</EquationSource> <EquationSource Format="MATHML"> <math xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <mrow> <mi>F</mi> <mo>∘</mo> <mi>f</mi> </mrow> </math> </EquationSource> </InlineEquation>, where <InlineEquation ID="IEq2"> <EquationSource Format="TEX">$$F$$</EquationSource> <EquationSource Format="MATHML"> <math xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <mi>F</mi> </math> </EquationSource> </InlineEquation> is a univariate function. Herein, the composition...</equationsource></equationsource></inlineequation></equationsource></equationsource></inlineequation></citationref>

A large number of problems in ab-initio quantum chemistry involve finding the global minimum of the total system energy. These problems are traditionally solved by numerical approaches equivalent to local optimization. While these approaches are relatively efficient, they do not provide...

We describe a branch-and-bound (b&b) method aimed at searching for an exact solution of the fundamental problem of decomposing a matrix into the sum of a sparse matrix and a low-rank matrix. Previous heuristic techniques employed convex and nonconvex optimization. We leverage and extend those...