The Energy Journal

Over the next several decades, Japan and the United States will pursue dramatically different nuclear power strategies. In the United States, no new reactors have been ordered since 1978, and no U.S. utility is seriously planning any new construction. In contrast, Japanese utilities aggressively continue to plan, order, and build new nuclear plants, and the Japanese government and utility industry are committed to increasing Japan's nuclear reliance from 26 percent of total generation to 49 percent by the year 2010.

Fifteen years after the 1973-74 oil embargo, two of the programs designed by consuming countries to cope with oil disruptions are still in place. One is the strategic stockpiles of oil owned or controlled by the governments of the industrial nations. The other is the oil-sharing plan of the International Energy Agency. In fact, both programs received their impetus from the IEA, which was formed in 1974 by the United States, Canada, most Western European countries (except France), Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. The TEA requires signatory countries to hold oil stocks equal to ninety days' imports of oil (interpreted generally as an amount over and above normal working stocks). This has largely been accomplished. Oil sharing, however, is to be imposed only in the event of oil-supply cutoffs of 7 percent or more to any individual member or the group as a whole. Although petitioned several times by individual countries, sharing has never been implemented. Neither has the program been systematically evaluated by a task force outside the IEA. This is the purpose of the study which this paper draws upon (Horwich and Weimer, eds., 1988).

The economic planning process in India can broadly be broken up into two steps: the building up of Five Year Plans and the specification of Annual Plans. Several planning models were used to arrive at a balanced allocation of resources for attaining the objectives and targets of growth and social welfare postulated in each Five Year Plan.

This paper investigates an oil company's optimal depletion of oil and gas reservoirs, taking into account that the depletion policy itself influences the recoverable reserves, i.e. determines the recovery factor. The emphasis is on the role of up-front capital costs. The depletion policy is derived from the amount of investment in production and associated injection projects, represented in a stylized fashion. I make a comparative static study of how various economic factors influence the company's choice of an optimal depletion policy and, thus, implicitly of an optimal recovery factor.

Since 1965 U.S. air travel has grown three times faster than GNP. Jet fuel demand, although virtually unchanged between 1969 and 1982 because of improved efficiency in fuel use by jet aircraft, has grown 30 percent since 1982. The key question is whether fuel-efficiency improvements can keep up with the rapid growth in air travel.

The United States and Canada recently concluded a comprehensive agreement which calls for removing restrictions on trade between them, including energy. To explain the details of the energy portions of the agreement, we present by a series of comments by seven authors from both sides of the border. They deal with various energy sources (oil, gas, electricity and uranium) and with the situations peculiar to various geographic locations.

The recent introduction of traded options on crude oil futures contracts at the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) gives energy economists a new tool for forecasting the price of crude oil. Since the pricing of these options requires that market participants assess the probability distribution of future crude oil prices, a properly specified model of option pricing can be used to "back out" this assessment from observed option prices.