Persistent and significant privately-held stockpiles of crude oil have long been an important empirical regularity in the United States. Such stockpiles would not rationally be held in a traditional Hotelling-style model. How then can the existence of these inventories be explained? In the...

In recent years, we have observed significant growth in unconventional energy, shale energy, in particular in the United States. There was a boom, followed by a bust. The plunge in oil price triggered a prolonged bust in the energy sector. Which firms will benefit, and which will be squeezed out...

By convention, the petroleum industry relies on thermal equivalence to summarize the results of upstream oil and gas operations — measuring outputs in terms of barrels of “oil equivalent.” This despite the fact that the two commodities trade at nothing like thermal parity. Drawing on a...