In recent years the oil market has undergone relevant changes, the most evident being the reduction in prices observed from 2014-15. Many tend to associate these changes with temporary factors on the supply or demand side. The author in this paper discusses the importance of the "Shale oil...

This paper presents an analysis of new, regulatory data on commodity swaps, focused on West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil. We find that commercial end-users have a much larger footprint in the WTI swaps space than financial end-users do. Commercials have a much larger exposure in swaps than...

An estimate is made of the specific risk to the fossil fuel sector from wind and solar generation and from electric vehicles. The systemic risk to investment portfolios from climate change is then analysed

This paper develops earlier work on the impairment to the value of investment portfolios from global warming later this century. The growth in renewables and electric vehicles may be enough to strand fossil fuel assets from the late 2020s onwards, but will not alone bring emissions down fast...

This paper considers the effects of refinery outages (due to planned turn-arounds or unplanned events) on current petroleum product prices and future refinery investment. Empirical evidence on these relationships is mixed and highly dependent on the size and duration of the outage, the...

US shale gas production is generally expected to continue its fast rise. However, a cautious evaluation is needed. Shale gas resource estimates are potentially overoptimistic and it is uncertain to which extent they can be produced economically. Moreover, the adverse environmental effects of...

This article studies the likely impact of unconventional gas developments in the U.S. on EU competitiveness. We find, first of all, little evidence for a prosperous unconventional gas development in Europe. Second, the U.S. boom has already a strong impact on both world and European energy...

Italian Abstract: L'olio di scisto presenta caratteristiche strutturali che lo distinguono dal petrolio "tradizionale", come il minor tempo necessario per costruire nuovi impianti, la minore durata dell'investimento e un rapporto inferiore tra costi fissi e costi variabili. Queste differenze...

Using the aggregate number of oil rigs as a proxy of oil investment, I evaluate the bidirectional relationship between oil prices and oil investment in OPEC and Non-OPEC countries. We take advantage of Bayesian estimation techniques and innovation accounting to incorporate the long run dynamics...

US shale gas production is generally expected to continue its fast rise. However, a cautious evaluation is needed. Shale gas resource estimates are potentially overoptimistic and it is uncertain to which extent they can be produced economically. Moreover, the adverse environmental effects of...