Political And Investment Risk In The International Oil And Gas Industry

This book examines the financial, legal and institutional strategies available to the international oil and gas industry to manage political and investment risk. The financial techniques for mitigating and allocating risk include corporate finance, joint ventures, and project finance. The legal techniques include production sharing agreements, profit sharing agreements, service contracts, bilateral investment treaties, and multilateral investment treaties. The institutional techniques include domestic courts, national constitutions, international arbitral tribunals, governmental and non-governmental regulatory agencies, alliances and energy diplomacy.This book traces the historical development of these techniques and their application in practice. The effectiveness with which companies manage political and investment risk is important for the financial sustainability of individual firms and the industry as whole. The real and perceived level of risk affects the level of exploration expenditures and therefore the balance between supply and demand, and the price of oil and natural gas. The search for a secure supply of oil and gas affects the political, military, and economic relations between countries. Consequently, every developed and developing country has placed energy policy at or near the top of its national priorities.

In this book, the author draws upon his training in political science and experience as an energy consultant at Atlantis, Inc. It explores the conflicting interests of host and firm, and discusses the way firms use political risk analyses leads us to the issue of managing political risk.

Twelve chapters cover a wide variety of topics, including finance, contracts, political risk insurance, legal issues, economics, and technical cooperation. All treatment of these subjects focuses on conditions expected to exist in the mid 1990s. No subject index or bibliography. Annotation copyright

Because political events can determine the success or failure of an investment abroad, transnational companies must make every effort to analyze political risks as part of the decisionmaking process. States and Companies, written especially for students of international business and executives of transnational companies, presents a conceptual framework for the analysis of political risk. Although the author focuses his study on the international oil industry, his explanatory model of political risk is applicable to most transnational companies. Lax's study is important because it focuses on developing a context for understanding political risk rather than simply offering a predictive methodology. He provides the theoretical groundwork for this understanding by explaining political risk in terms of a broader theory of interaction between host states and transnational corporations. The inherent conflict of interests and issues hierarchies between these two actors, Lax argues, is the root cause of political risk.

Valuing portfolios of options embedded in investment decisions is arguably one of the most important and challenging problems in real options and corporate ?nance in general. Although the problem is common and vitally important in the value creation process of almost any corporation, it has not yet been satisfactorily addressed. It is key for any corporation facing strategic resource allocation decisions, be it a pharmaceutical ?rm valuing and managing its pipeline of drugs, a telecom company having to select a set of technological alternatives, a venture capital or private equity ?rm investing in a portfolio of ventures, or any company allocating resources. Portfolios of real options typically interact such that the value of the whole differs from the sum of the separate parts. Thus one must address and value the particular con?guration of options embedded in a speci?c situation, taking into account the con?guration of other options already present in the portfolio, which in turn depends on the correlation struc ture among the various underlying assets and the strategic dependencies among the options themselves (e. g. , mutual exclusivity, strategic additiv ity, compoundness, complementarity etc. ). In that sense, optimal decisions also depend on past option exercise decisions by management and organi zational capabilities put in place in the past.