Blue Gold The Political Economy Of Natural Gas

Originally published in 1987 this book presents a comprehensive survey of the global natural gas industry: it looks at the problems of supply, the pattern of demand, the economics of the industrya nd how the industry in the 1980s was being affected by changes in other energy sectors. As a key commodity in the world economy the supply of natural gas is increasingly affecting and changing international relations between importer and supplier countries: the siberian natural gas pipeline which supplies Soviet gas to Western Europe is a key example of the impact of natural gas on international relations and one which is discussed in the book.

With greater reserves than crude oil and lower pollutant emissions that any other hydrocarbon, natural gas is posted to take the world by storm. Yet such a failure is littered with obstacles. Sources of natural gas are further and further removed from centres of consumption. Costs of extraction and transport are spiralling upwards. Iranian and Russian political leveraging of natural gas has raised fears of future supply disruptions. Differing regulatory regimes and pricing systems have prevented the development of a unified global market for fuel. This book focuses on the political economy of natural gas, constants on its future, consumption and the environmental consequences of its use. Chapter by chapter, readers learns about the properties of the fuel, the challenges of its transport, the different national regulatory and marketing regimes, the promises and perils of non-conventional natural gas and possible future new uses.

This book addresses energy research from four distinct International Political Economy perspectives: energy security, governance, legal and developmental areas. Energy is too important to be neglected by political scientists. Yet, within the mainstream of the discipline energy research still remains a peripheral area of academic enquiry seeking to plug into the discipline’s theoretical debates. The purpose of this book is to assess how existing perspectives fit with our understanding of social science energy research by focusing on the oil and gas dimension.

The global trend to replace traditional fossil fuels like coal and oil with clean burning gas has been spurred on largely by heightened environmental concerns and international commitments to comply with noxious emission limits. The physical and combustion characteristics of natural gas are able to respond to these environmental concerns, thus providing highly industrialized nations in particular with a means to meet the requirements of international environmental agreements. The use of natural gas also includes the important advantage of high efficiency in gas-to-electricity conversion, a factor central to developing nations. Both the above have created a new demand sector for natural gas, which is reflected in the substantial growth of internationally traded gas over the last decade. This volume covers topics ranging from the commercial opportunities and constraints relating to natural gas exploitation - and its implications for the global oil industry - to the emerging gas technologies that are likely to chart its future development. The book also assesses the impact of government regulation and liberalization on the industry, from the Canadian and European perspectives, as well as regional developments in the Asian market, thus presenting a broad vision of past and future trends in the natural gas industry.