The Program on Energy and Sustainable Development is part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
FSI researchers consider international development from a variety of angles. They analyze ideas such as how public action and good governance are cornerstones of economic prosperity in Mexico and how investments in high school education will improve China’s economy.
They are looking at novel technological interventions to improve rural livelihoods, like the development implications of solar power-generated crop growing in Northern Benin.
FSI academics also assess which political processes yield better access to public services, particularly in developing countries. With a focus on health care, researchers have studied the political incentives to embrace UNICEF’s child survival efforts and how a well-run anti-alcohol policy in Russia affected mortality rates.
FSI’s work on international development also includes training the next generation of leaders through pre- and post-doctoral fellowships as well as the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program.
PESD participated in a Beijing meeting on sustainable growth from the macro-perspective, energy conservation, efficiency of resource use and environmental stewardship. The topics were discussed at a two day workshop sponsored by the Stanford Center for International Development.
Tsinghua University, Beijing
National oil companies (NOCs) appear resurgent in the global energy markets and now control a sizeable majority of the world's oil and gas reserves. Their performance therefore plays a key role in these markets and has implications for the supply of oil and gas resources. This paper analyzes available macro-level data on oil and gas companies in order to quantitatively compare the performance of NOCs with international oil companies (IOCs) including the global majors. Due to performance shortcomings or government-dictated strategies that differ from those of purely profit-maximizing enterprises, NOCs are seen to extract resources far less efficiently than IOCs. Much of the oil and gas reserves in NOC hands are thus effectively "dead." At the same time, NOC performance is far from monolithic - some national oil companies are able to perform at or near the level of the global majors, while others fall significantly short.
Despite over a century of investment in electric power systems, there are roughly 1.6 billion people who lack access to electricity service, mainly in rural areas. While there are some open questions regarding the precise cause and effect relationships between rural electrification and human welfare, it is generally considered an important social, economic, and political priority to provide electricity to all.
Rural electrification is a challenging task because it involves delivery of a service to populations that are remote and dispersed and whose consumption is low. This means it is generally more expensive while at the same time the customer base is generally poorer and less able to pay the full cost of service. Combine these factors with utilities that are often poorly managed and have limited finances, and it is often not feasible to expect extension of the grid to unserved rural populations in the near future. Such conditions are also challenging for the development of new renewable energy technology markets.
This paper discusses the role that electricity plays in the development process and its importance in rural areas; the contest between centralized and distributed solutions and their relative competitiveness; the previous experience and research on distributed generation and which business models fare successful; and broader lessons that can be extracted from the work.
Stanford Law School Professor and director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development, David Victor, authors the book chapter "Fragmented carbon markets and reluctant nations: implications for the design of effective architectures" in the recently published book by the Belfer Center at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard.
With increasing greenhouse gas emissions, we are embarked on an unprecedented experiment with an uncertain outcome for the future of the planet. The Kyoto Protocol serves as an initial step through 2012 to mitigate the threats posed by global climate change but policy-makers, scholars, businessmen, and environmentalists have begun debating the structure of the successor to the Kyoto agreement. Written by a team of leading scholars in economics, law and international relations, this book contributes to this debate by examining the merits of six alternative international architectures for climate policy.
PESD has been studying the emerging global market for natural gas through a series of closely integrated research projects. The topics of these studies range from focusing on the geopolitical implications of a shift to a global gas market, the factors that affect gas pricing and flows as LNG links the U.S. and European markets across the Atlantic basin, and how gas projects fare in privately-owned independent power projects (IPPs) in emerging markets.
One of the open questions in all these studies concerned China--the country uses relatively small amounts of gas now but could use much more in the future. The role of natural gas in the Chinese economy is of critical import both domestically and for global energy and environmental issues. The competition between coal and natural gas in this market has tremendous implications for local air pollution and for climate change. Rising demand for imported gas in China will also shape the LNG market in the Pacific Basin and could lead to the construction of major international pipeline projects to monetize gas supplies in Russia and the Middle East. The present paper is one in a series that looks at the Chinese market in detail.
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Varun's research focuses on technologies and policies for carbon capture and storage (CCS), technological innovation and diffusion, and the technology and energy policy of India. He leads the carbon capture and storage (CCS) research at PESD.
He received his Ph.D. and MS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford with specialization in energy systems and technologies. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur.
The BP Foundation has awarded a five-year, $7.5 million grant to Stanford University's Program on Energy and Sustainable Development to support research on modern energy markets. The foundation is funded by BP, one of the world's largest energy companies.
The gift follows the BP Foundation's initial grant of $1.8 million over three years, which was pledged in 2004 in support of the program.
"BP's support has allowed our program to study the world's most pressing energy problems, such as global warming, energy poverty and the prospects for the world oil market," said program director and Stanford law Professor David G. Victor. "In addition to BP Foundation support, we learn from BP's experience as an energy company because they operate in all the markets where we do research--such as in China and India."
"BP Foundation believes the work undertaken at Stanford deals directly with global issues that are key to meeting the world's growing energy needs," said Steve Elbert, chairman of the BP Foundation. "The drive to research and implement strategies to further understand today's energy markets is important work, and we are proud to partner again with Stanford."
The Program on Energy and Sustainable Development, part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, concentrates on the legal, political and institutional dimensions of how societies derive value from energy. The BP Foundation grant is part of a rapid expansion of Stanford's research and teaching on energy issues, much of which focuses on the technical aspects of energy systems.
All of the program's research is public and published openly, including on its website. The gift from the BP Foundation, as well as all similar gifts to support the program's research, includes special provisions that assure the research program's independence in setting its research agenda.
The agreement with Stanford is one in a series of BP partnerships with universities in the United Kingdom, the United States and China, representing a total commitment of more than $600 million. The program at Stanford complements work on similar topics at Princeton University, Tsinghua University and Imperial College, among others.
Founded in 2001, the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development focuses on the "political economy" of modern energy services--the interaction of political, institutional and economic forces that often dominate energy markets. It collaborates with the Stanford Law School and other university departments and schools, including economics, engineering and earth sciences. About half of the program's resources are devoted to research partnerships in key developing countries, including Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa. Program researchers have examined the emergence of a global business in natural gas, reforms of electric power markets and the supply of modern energy services to low-income rural households in developing countries.
The program's other major sponsor is the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, Calif., a research consortium that includes most of the world's largest electric companies.
Program on Energy and Sustainable Development
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Mark C. Thurber is Associate Director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD) at Stanford University, where he studies and teaches about energy and environmental markets and policy. Dr. Thurber has written and edited books and articles on topics including global fossil fuel markets, climate policy, integration of renewable energy into electricity markets, and provision of energy services to low-income populations.
Dr. Thurber co-edited and contributed to Oil and Governance: State-owned Enterprises and the World Energy Supply (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and The Global Coal Market: Supplying the Major Fuel for Emerging Economies (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He is the author of Coal (Polity Press, 2019) about why coal has thus far remained the preeminent fuel for electricity generation around the world despite its negative impacts on local air quality and the global climate.
Dr. Thurber teaches a course on energy markets and policy at Stanford, in which he runs a game-based simulation of electricity, carbon, and renewable energy markets. With Dr. Frank Wolak, he also conducts game-based workshops for policymakers and regulators. These workshops explore timely policy topics including how to ensure resource adequacy in a world with very high shares of renewable energy generation.
Dr. Thurber has previous experience working in high-tech industry. From 2003-2005, he was an engineering manager at a plant in Guadalajara, México that manufactured hard disk drive heads. He holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University and a B.S.E. from Princeton University.
The Stanford Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD) is concluding a major study aimed at understanding the future role for natural gas in the rapidly growing economies of China and India. On June 4-5, 2007 PESD will convene a meeting at Stanford to present the results of the study and engage with participants from industry and academia on the implications of this work for global energy markets.
PESD has partnered with leading regional research centers in both China and India to construct detailed assessments of the key drivers for future gas demand in both countries. At the June meeting PESD and its research collaborators will share results from the natural gas study and explore the study's broader implications on China and India's role in the future world energy market. Meeting participants will include representatives from government, industry, academia, and non-government organizations from the United States, China, India, Europe, and others.
Panels at the meeting with focus primarily on the implications of the study on larger questions of energy and global geopolitics, including:
§ Competitiveness of natural gas vis a vis coal in the power sector
§ Geopolitical implications of major supply projects
§ Regulatory reform and pricing
§ Implications for CO2 and climate change
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Over the last fifteen years the world's largest developing countries have initiated market reforms in their electric power sectors from generation to distribution. This book evaluates the experiences of five of those countries - Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa - as they have shifted from state-dominated systems to schemes allowing for a larger private sector role. As well as having the largest power systems in their regions and among the most rapidly rising consumption of electricity in the world, these countries are the locus of massive financial investment and the effects of their power systems are increasingly felt in world fuel markets. In-depth case studies also reveal important variations in reform efforts. This accessible volume explains the origins of these reform efforts and offers a theory as to why - despite diverse backgrounds - reform efforts in all five countries have stalled in similar ways.