Blake Sutton and Zhen Zhu

August 10, 2020

In this podcast, Zhen Zhu and Blake Sutton discuss the recent characteristics in asset acquisition in U.S. oil and gas upstream sectors and emphasize the land management costs associated with asset acquisition in various parts of the shale plays.

Blake Sutton is an undergraduate economics student and has worked as a landman for 3+ years. He has worked independently and for both large and small brokerages based in the Oklahoma City area.

Zhen Zhu, Ph.D., is a professor of economics who teaches courses in energy economics, business forecasting, energy finance, and energy risk management. He also consults regularly for business and has been an expert witness on issues related to regulated utility cost of capital, load forecasting, energy risk management and so on. See his UCO profile at https://www3.uco.edu/centraldirectory/profiles/2280.

Distinguished Lecturer Series 

Oil Demand: Vehicles, Viruses, and Volatility  

January 25, 2021

Author:  Marianne Kah

In this edition, Columbia University’s Marianne Kah discusses oil demand trends for the short and long-term. Marianne considers impacts on oil demand from the growth of alternative vehicles and the COVID-19 pandemic. She highlights an upcoming Columbia University study done jointly with the University of California, Davis on COVID and oil demand. The study includes four scenarios based on two critical uncertainties around the level of disruption from COVID and government policy interventions aiming to accelerate oil demand destruction. The study will be released in 2021.

During the podcast, Marianne also addresses the concept of peak oil demand, impact of the Biden administration on oil supply and demand, and hydrogen in transportation. 

Marianne Kah is an Adjunct Senior Research Scholar and Advisory Board member with Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. Prior to joining Columbia, she was the Chief Economist of ConocoPhillips at its Houston headquarters for 25 years. In addition, Marianne is a former President of the USAEE and was recipient our organization’s Senior Fellow Award. 

Carey W. King

December 3, 2020

In this podcast Carey discusses content from his new book, The Economic Superorganism:

Beyond the Competing Narratives on Energy, Growth, and Policy, that relates to how some economists, ecologists, and other scientists view the economy as a system that has evolved in the same manner as biological organisms.  For reasons we don’t necessarily fully understand, the economy seems to pursue what is known as the maximum power principle and increasing rates of work output (in the thermodynamic sense of work).  Carey discusses some of the philosophical and policy-related questions arising out of this concept, such as whether there is some inherent growth imperative that is making it difficult for we, as humans, to invoke enough agency to pursue long-term goals such as a low-carbon energy transition.

Dr. Carey W King is Research Scientist at The University of Texas at Austin and Assistant Director at the Energy Institute. Carey performs interdisciplinary research related to how energy systems interact within the economy and environment as well as how our policy and social systems can make decisions and tradeoffs among these often competing factors. The past performance of our energy systems is no guarantee of future returns, yet we must understand the development of past energy systems. Carey's research goals center on rigorous interpretations of the past to determine the most probable future energy pathways.

Sanya Carley

June 23, 2020

The energy transition in the United States, as well as elsewhere across the world, generates disparities in benefits and burdens across both people and places. In this podcast, I discuss the justice dimensions of the energy transition, including its effects on frontline communities, energy insecure households, and those that do not have access to the various opportunities provided by the transition. I then discuss two of my recent research efforts. The first focuses on energy justice programs across the U.S., and the degree to which local entities are responding to vulnerabilities associated with the energy transition, or not when they offer such programs. The second focuses on the increased prevalence of energy insecurity among American households during the COVID-19 pandemic, and which populations most impacted. 

Dr. Sanya Carley is a Professor and Director of the Master of Public Affairs programs at the O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University. Her research focuses on electricity and transportation policy, energy justice and a just transition, energy-based economic development, and public perceptions of energy infrastructure and technologies. She is a coeditor of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. She received her Ph.D. in public policy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and bachelor's degrees in economics and sustainable development from Swarthmore College.

Gürcan Gülen

May 14, 2020

The levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) is commonly used by the media but is seriously flawed. It is of dubious value for long-term planning to meet growing electricity demand or even to reduce emissions at the lowest system cost. It is useless in real-time system operations to balance demand and supply instantaneously while maintaining reliability. It doesn't capture regional differences in its inputs, specifics of each power system, or the value of different operational characteristics to the system reliability. It is time to replace it. To build on its current prominence, today's generic LCOE can be augmented by the costs of system integration to get a system LCOE, which is still imperfect but a more accurate representation of overall system costs. For policy discussions, we need to add the costs of externalities and subsidies. Only then, we have a useful metric, on which we can base discussions about a least-cost portfolio approach to transitioning electric power systems to achieve environmental and consumer goals.

Supplemental Information: Time to Replace LCOE

Jonathan Chanis

July 20, 2020

Recent oil market developments have encouraged renewed talk about the need for a "global oil market supply manager." The latest rendition of this notion even suggests that the United States, either by itself or in concert with Saudi Arabia and/or Russia could play such a role. However, enthusiasm for this idea is based on a number of misconceptions about how a global oil supply manager would operate, and about the most important source of extreme oil price volatility.

As Managing Member of New Tide Asset Management, LLC, Jonathan Chanis consults on energy, geopolitics, and macroeconomics, and he trades and invests for his own account. Previously, as Senior Vice President of Policy at Securing America's Future Energy, Jonathan was responsible for planning and directing the research, analysis, and writing of SAFE's policy team. Before joining SAFE, Jonathan taught graduate students at Columbia University about energy security and scenario planning, and he consulted on petroleum and natural gas security, and supply and value chain management. For 20 years prior to this, Jonathan traded and invested in energy and emerging market equities, and commodities, and currencies. He was a Senior Trader at Caxton Associates, a Vice President at Goldman Sachs' commodities division (J. Aron & Co.), and a Managing Director at Tribeca Global Management (a division of Citigroup).

Russel Gold

June 11, 2019

Author and journalist Russel Gold identifies regulatory barriers to the growth of low carbon electricity while discussing his new book, Superpower: One Man's Quest to Transform American Energy. He highlights pathways for overcoming those barriers, the importance of individuals in shifting energy paradigms, and the role of USAEE member research in the energy transition. The interview also includes an interesting twist on the classic chicken and egg challenge in Energy.

Anna (Ebers) Broughel

September 17, 2020

This podcast is dedicated to the matters of public acceptance and investor acceptance of wind energy technologies in Europe and the US. The talk provides insights on best project development practices, ranging from utilization of immersive virtual reality technology for project visualizations to describing the community's preferences with respect to wind project characteristics. The talk touches upon willingness-to-invest in community finance in different countries, as well as the role of the third-party project developers in the energy transition.

Anna (Ebers) Broughel is an energy economist and statistician at Tetra Tech, with a decade of experience in energy project management and data analysis. Prior to joining Tetra Tech, Dr. Ebers worked as a technical project manager at the Solar Energy Technologies Office of the U.S. Department of Energy. During 4 years of her post-doctoral training, she researched permitting barriers to large energy projects, working collaboratively with co-authors from Sweden, Austria, Germany, and other countries, and presented to a wide range of audiences at both academic and industry conferences.

She holds an MA from the University of Konstanz, Germany, and a Ph.D. in economics and policy from the State University of New York in association with Syracuse University, where she was a Fulbright scholar. After completing her post-doctoral work at the University of St.Gallen, Switzerland, she gained further professional experience as a researcher and lecturer at the University of Maryland, College Park. Currently, she serves as a council member for the U.S. Association for Energy Economics and a non-resident fellow at the University of Texas at Austin.

Professor Douglas B. Reynolds, Ph.D.

July 30, 2020

This podcast, based on the working paper of the same name, explains why petroleum is the best physical type of energy. It then talks about how the search for energy proceeds, including the economics of the Hubbert curve. It looks at U.S. shale-oil potential supplies by falsifying various hypotheses. Finally, an explanation about how civilizations are defined and energetically sustained is given in order to show parallels between previous civilizations and our own.

Dr. Douglas B. Reynolds is a professor of petroleum and energy economics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He has lived, worked, and studied in many countries. He has worked on energy-economic models for Alaska. He lived in the former Soviet Union just after the fall. He has published multiple articles, books and book chapters and has an academic Google Hirsch Index of 15. His full CV of articles based on each article's relative importance in descending order can be found at scholarworks@UA at: http://hdl.handle.net/11122/11180.

Marie Fagan

April 20, 2020

Although the scale of oil demand destruction from the Covid-19 pandemic is unprecedented, it does not mean there are no precedents to help us think about what oil demand will look like after the crisis passes. London Economics International recently completed a study of 40+ years of global oil supply and demand shocks, to understand how oil demand responds after a crisis. What history teaches us is that declines in global oil intensity come in large stair-steps, not gradually. And once oil intensity drops down a stair-step, it does not fully recover to previous levels, even after many years.

Title: USAEE19 Government Track: Funding Session: Elaine Ulrich 

Date: February 13, 2020