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Clay Ramel: “Reconsidering the Roots of Crude Coercion: a Policymaking Analysis of “the Oil Weapon””

In a special edition of Elements journal that covered the one-year anniversary of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, CISAC Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow Edward Blandford and Joonhong Ahn outline the factors that led to the meltdown: site selection, hazard assessment and site preparation, approaches to managing risk, and reactor design. The paper analyzes how the earthquake and tsunami unleashed a chain of events that eventually led to the meltdown and release of radioactive material.  

This report provides one of the first coherent, readable narratives of the Fukushima nuclear disaster—what happened in the first few days. It is based on new sources available in Japanese and National Diet testimonies, and is an objective overview of events as they unfolded, rather than an ideologically positioned effort of advocacy. The report goes on to analyze the institutional and governance aspects of Japan’s nuclear oversight, highlighting the fundamental problems that surfaced during the disaster that stem from deeper structural issues. The report also draws upon expertise from a conference held at Stanford University in February 2012 to analyze the politics and industry structure of Japan’s electric power sector, making concrete recommendations for reorganizing the power industry and government oversight structure.

Abstract

Mark C. Thurber, David R. Hults

National oil companies (NOCs) often behave in strikingly different ways from one another and from private, international oil companies (IOCs). Given that NOCs control about three-quarters of world oil reserves by equity share, their variation in corporate strategy has important implications for the world oil market. The recently released book Oil and Governance: State-owned Enterprises and the World Energy Supply, which we co-edited (along with our colleague, David Victor) and contributed to, explores the variation among NOCs through 15 detailed case studies and several cross-cutting pieces. Building off the research in that book, our aim in this essay is to discuss the differences among NOCs in their approach to risk. 

As described by Nolan and Thurber in Chapter 4 of our book, the notion of risk encapsulates both the likelihood of a negative outcome (e.g., of drilling a dry hole) and the loss that such an outcome would entail (e.g., the investment in an exploration well). Risks are pervasive in the oil industry because of the enormous sums of money on the line and the significant uncertainty around whether investments will prove successful. In this article we suggest that the goals of the state and its tools of governance may cause an NOC to tend towards one of three types of behavior: risk avoidance, risk taking, or risk management. Each of these three approaches to risk, we find, can be useful or counterproductive for the state depending on the context.

It can be useful for an NOC to avoid risk, as Sonangol has done, if its government is highly dependent on oil revenue, but this approach usually means that it must allow IOCs to shoulder risks if the oil sector is to thrive. Intelligent risk taking by the NOC, on the other hand, can help build domestic technological capability and may be a reasonable approach if the government has less need to maximize hydrocarbon revenue in the short term. Finally, commercial risk management by the NOC may be an appropriate model where the NOC has developed some competitive advantages and its government has few remaining expectations for the NOC apart from revenue generation. There is no “right” or “wrong” approach to risk for NOCs in a general sense. The goal of each government and its NOC should be to make sure that the way the NOC takes, avoids, or manages risk is of benefit to both the country and the NOC itself.

Link to article (free trial subscription available) => http://www.worldoil.com/June-2012-Risk-attitudes-shape-national-oil-company-strategies.html