Any mention of climate policy was noticeably missing from President Obama's recent state of the union address. This is unfortunate because every day of inaction on climate policy by the United States government is another day that American consumers must pay substantially higher prices for products derived from crude oil, such as gasoline and diesel fuel. Moreover, a substantial fraction of the revenues from these higher prices goes to governments of countries that the US would prefer not to support.

Executive Summary

As the world's fifth largest coal exporter and a key swing supplier between the Atlantic and Pacific coal markets, South Africa is a crucial player in global markets.  While the country has long been Europe's major supplier of coal, South African exports have begun to shift east and are steadily becoming a major source of coal supply for the Asian coal boom.  This strategic positioning sets the stage for South Africa to become an even more important player in determining how the world trades and prices coal. 

Conventional wisdom holds that oil sector nationalizations are rooted in political motives of the petroleum states, which perceive value in the direct control of resource development though a state enterprise.  State motives are inarguably important.  At the same time, we argue in this paper that constraints of risk significantly affect a state's choice of which agent to employ to extract its hydrocarbons.  Implicit in much current debate is the idea that private, international oil companies (IOCs) and the state-controlled, national oil companies (NOCs) are direct competitors, and that the

China's coal market is now in the midst of a radical restructuring that has the potential to change how coal is produced, traded and consumed both in China and the rest of the world.  The restructuring aims to integrate the coal and power sectors at giant "coal-power bases" that combined would churn out more coal annually than all the coal produced in the entire United States. 

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is now widely viewed as imperative for global climate stabilisation. Coal is the world’s fastest growing fossil fuel, and coal combustion is now the largest single source of anthropogenic CO2 emissions.

The majority of rural residents in China are dependent on traditional fuels, but the quality and quantity of existing data on the process of fuel switching in rural China are insufficient to have a clear picture of current conditions and a well-grounded outlook for the future.

Nigeria depends heavily on oil and gas, with hydrocarbon activities providing around 65 percent of total government revenue and 95 percent of export revenues.  While Nigeria supplies some LNG to world markets and is starting to export a small amount of gas to Ghana via pipeline, the great majority of the country's hydrocarbon earnings come from oil.  In 2008, Nigeria was the 5^th largest oil exporter and 10^th largest holder of proved oil reserves in the world according to the U.S.

This paper introduces a tool to analyze the future developments of the international steam coal market, the "COALMOD-World" model. Steam coal is a major fuel for electricity generation today and its use is expected to grow dramatically in the coming decades, despite the potential negative external effect on the climate through the CO₂ emissions.

Sectoral crediting mechanisms such as sectoral no-lose targets have been proposed as a way to provide incentives for emission reductions in developing countries as part of an international climate agreement, and scale up carbon trading from the project-level Clean Development Mechanism to the sectoral level.

Over the past two decades, Indonesia's coal industry has transformed itself from being an unknown, minor player in Asia's coal markets to the world's largest exporter of steam coal. In what is likely the most detailed analysis of the Indonesian coal industry ever released, Dr. Bart Lucarelli tells the story of how Indonesia created this world-scale industry over two decades despite challenges created by widespread government corruption, a weak legal system, the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, and the fall of the Soeharto government in 1998.

Executive summary:

Statoil was founded in 1972 as the national oil company (NOC) of Norway.  Along with Brazil's Petrobras, Statoil today is a leader in several technological areas including operations in deep water.  With its arm's length relationship to the Norwegian government and partially-private ownership, it is generally considered to be among the state-controlled oil companies most similar to an international oil company in governance, business strategy, and performance.

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is the leading international carbon market and a driving force for sustainable development globally. But the eruption of controversy over offsets from Chinese wind power has exposed cracks at the core of how carbon credits are verified in developing economies. It has become almost impossible to determine whether offsets from Chinese wind are "additional" and that they in fact represent "real" reductions beyond business as usual.

Norway has made a point of administering its petroleum resources using three distinct government bodies: a national oil company (NOC) engaged in commercial hydrocarbon operations; a government ministry to help set policy; and a regulatory body to provide oversight and technical expertise.  In Norway's case, this institutional design has provided useful checks and balances, helped minimize conflicts of interest, and allowed the NOC, Statoil, to focus on commercial activities while other government agencies regulate oil operators including Statoil itself.  Norway's relative success in managin