Stanford University

Energy

This image is having trouble loading!FSI researchers examine the role of energy sources from regulatory, economic and societal angles. The Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD) investigates how the production and consumption of energy affect human welfare and environmental quality. Professors assess natural gas and coal markets, as well as the smart energy grid and how to create effective climate policy in an imperfect world. This includes how state-owned enterprises – like oil companies – affect energy markets around the world. Regulatory barriers are examined for understanding obstacles to lowering carbon in energy services. Realistic cap and trade policies in California are studied, as is the creation of a giant coal market in China.

2010 Regional Council of Rural Counties Meeting (RCRC)

PESD Director Frank Wolak will be leading the "Petroleum's Future" talk along with Michael Roman from the Public and Government Affairs, ExxonMobil Corporation.  This 3-day event features individuals across academia and the public and private sector.

 

Talk abstract:

Petroleum's Future
Despite volatile price swings, the political instability in major oil-producing regions and the recent devastating spill in the Gulf of Mexico, petroleum remains the primary source of California's energy needs. Removing our society's dependence on petroleum remains a difficult proposition involving alternatives, pricing and cost, and stability during any attempt to phase-out its use. More importantly, how will the role of petroleum affect rural counties - those living and working in rural areas as well as rural county governments making day-to-day decisions involving the use of petroleum-based products?


Finally, where does petroleum in California fit into a "post-AB 32 world"? This session will discuss all of these issues and more as two renowned experts in the field of energy share their views.

 

Click here to view Frank's presentation.

Marriott Napa Valley Hotel

Frank Wolak

Stanford University 
Economics Department 
579 Jane Stanford Way Stanford, CA 94305-6072 

Website: https://fawolak.org/

(650) 724-1712 (650) 724-1717
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Holbrook Working Professor of Commodity Price Studies in Economics
Senior Fellow, by courtesy, at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research
frank_wolak_033.jpg MS, PhD

Frank A. Wolak is a Professor in the Department of Economics at Stanford University. His fields of specialization are Industrial Organization and Econometric Theory. His recent work studies methods for introducing competition into infrastructure industries -- telecommunications, electricity, water delivery and postal delivery services -- and on assessing the impacts of these competition policies on consumer and producer welfare. He is the Chairman of the Market Surveillance Committee of the California Independent System Operator for electricity supply industry in California. He is a visiting scholar at University of California Energy Institute and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

Professor Wolak received his Ph.D. and M.S. from Harvard University and his B.A. from Rice University.

Director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development
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Conferences

FSE welcomes Cargill visiting fellow Awudu Abdulai to Stanford University

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Awudu Abdulai, chair of food economics at the University of Kiel, Germany, is FSE's Cargill visiting scholar from October 2010 - March 2011. While at Stanford he will be pursuing three research themes. The first looks at how farmers risk preferences influence their decisions to adopt water conservation technologies and how that impacts farm productivity. The second examines how social capital, property rights and tenure duration affect farmers' investment decisions on sustainable management practices. The third involves an analysis of the welfare impacts of cultivating export crops in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Kiel, Professor Abdulai taught at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETH) and also held visiting positions at the Departments of Economics at Yale University and Iowa State University, as well as the International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, DC. Abdulai is originally from Ghana and his fields of interests span development economics, consumer economics and industrial organization.

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FSE director Roz Naylor delivers lecture on 'The Battle Over Biofuels' as part of University of Washington's 2010 Food Series

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Her talk asks has the biofuels boom subsided, or are the battles just beginning? Is ethanol and biodiesel production compatible with the broader goals of feeding the world and saving wild biodiversity? Rosamond L. Naylor explores the political, economic, and scientific trade-offs behind the global expansion of crop-based biofuels.
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The BP Oil Spill: Environmental Justice Implications

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Join us for a discussion on human rights and environmental justice implications surrounding the BP oil spill from regulatory, litigation and conceptual perspectives.

Introduced and moderated by Dr. Helen Stacy, Co-ordinator, Program on Human Rights in the Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law and Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute.

Panelists:

Meg Caldwell, Director, Environmental and Natural Resources Law & Policy Program; Executive Director, Center for Ocean Solutions, Woods Institute for the Environment. Professor Caldwell's scholarship focuses on the environmental effects of local land use decisions, the use of science in environmental and marine resource policy development and implementation, and developing private and public incentives for natural resource conservation.

Deborah Sivas, Luke W. Cole Professor of Environmental Law and Director, Environmental Law Clinic. Professor Sivas's current research is focused on the interaction of law and science in the arena of climate change and coastal/marine policy and the ability of the public to hold policymakers accountable.

Ursula Heise, Director, Program in Modern Thought & Literature and Professor of English; member of the Executive Committee of the Program in Science, Technology & Society; Affiliated Faculty of the Woods Institute for the Environment. Author of Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008), After Nature: Species Extinction and Modern Culture, (forthcoming) and The Avantgarde and the Forms of Nature (in progress).

Stanford Law School
Room 280B

Conferences

2010 Orientation celebrates FSI's research, educational, and policy endeavors

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FSI's 2010 Fall Orientation welcomed faculty, staff, researchers, and friends of the institute to the new academic year and highlighted the institute's diverse research collaborations, educational programs, and policy engagement.  Presentations on display and in live video offered highlights of the current work of FSI centers and programs on many of the most challenging issues of the day. In his welcoming remarks, FSI Director Coit Blacker emphasized the interdisciplinary, cross-campus nature of FSI's work and thanked the FSI community for their many contributions to new knowledge and new approaches to many of the most pressing issues on today's global agenda.

This year's Orientation attracted the largest turnout to date. On continual display was a slide show capturing research of FSI centers and programs in the field and multi-disciplinary work here at the institute, along with highlights of FSI conferences, lectures, and policy endeavors compiled by FSI's Nora Sweeny.

Among the highlights were the following displays:

  • A presentation by the Center for International Security and Cooperation on the center's research, writing, policy influence, and Track II Diplomacy
  • A display of the many books published by the Walter Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center showing the range of economic, political, and regional issues addressed by APARC scholars, and a photo slideshow of recent events and publications demonstrating the breadth of faculty work bridging the U.S. and Asia
  • A presentation by The Europe Center, newly launched and housed jointly in FSI and the Division of International and Comparative Area Studies, featuring major research areas, visiting scholars, publications, and notable events
  • A presentation by Stanford Health Policy capturing its multidisciplinary work in medicine, law, business, economics, engineering, and psychology
  •  A presentation by the Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies, a two-year interdisciplinary Master's program, which captured the IPS practicum, scholarly concentrations, internships, and careers
  • A presentation by the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development featuring its work on environmental and policy research employing state of the art methodology to examine such issues as renewable energy, natural gas markets, national oil companies, low-income energy services, and climate change policy
  • A presentation by the Program on Food Security and the Environment which addresses hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation. FSE showcased its current research on topics such as solar electrification, food and nutrition security, climate change and conflicts, and evolving U.S. energy policy, as well as its upcoming series on Food Policy, Food Security, and the Environment
  • A presentation by the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education, which develops multi-disciplinary curriculum materials on international themes reflecting FSI scholarship. Recent educational projects include a three-part series examining U.S.-South Korean relations, Uncovering North Korea, and Inter-Korean Relations; and a collaboration with TeachAIDS, which works to address and overcome the social and cultural challenges related to HIV/AIDS prevention education through materials offered via the internet and CDs in several languages, http://teachaids.org
  • A presentation featuring the Stanford Global Gateway, a comprehensive directory of Stanford in the world
  • A presentation previewing the vision and mission of the Stanford Center at Peking University, opening Fall 2011

Other highlights included the presentations prepared by Stanford students who worked in the field this past summer. One group worked in China, developing a survey on nutrition and anemia and their effect on learning, with FSI's Scott Rozelle, Director of the Rural Education Action Program. A second group helped Dr. Paul Wise, professor of pediatrics and Stanford Health Policy core faculty member, evaluate prenatal care in the rural highlands of Guatemala.

 

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Awudu Abdulai

Department of Food Economics and Consumption Studies
University of Kiel, Olshausenstrasse 40,
24098 Kiel, Germany

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Cargill Visiting Fellow
Awudu_abdulai.png MA, PhD

Awudu Abdulai, chair of food economics at the University of Kiel, Germany, was FSE's Cargill visiting scholar from October 2010 - March 2011. While at Stanford he pursued three research themes. The first looked at how farmers risk preferences influence their decisions to adopt water conservation technologies and how that impacts farm productivity. The second examined how social capital, property rights and tenure duration affect farmers' investment decisions on sustainable management practices. The third involved an analysis of the welfare impacts of cultivating export crops in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Kiel, Professor Abdulai taught at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETH) and also held visiting positions at the Departments of Economics at Yale University and Iowa State University, as well as the International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, DC. Abdulai is originally from Ghana and his fields of interests span development economics, consumer economics and industrial organization.

Perennial Questions of Hydrology and Climate

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Matei Georgescu
David Lobell
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THE POLICY FORUM BY J. D. GLOVER ET AL. ("INCREASED FOOD AND ecosystem security via perennial grains," 25 June, p. 1638) highlights environmental advantages of perennial relative to annual bioenergy crop systems but omits potentially important consequences related to hydrology and climate. They categorize greater perennial leaf area index and rooting depth (relative to annual crops) as "utiliz[ing] more precipitation," but the work cited provides no evidence for increased rainfall recycling.

The direct climate impact of land-use change associated with bioenergy expansion (such as a shift from annual to perennial cropping systems) has received little attention. The impacts of changing fundamental biogeophysical surface properties associated with bioenergy crops may have significant implications for local and regional climate. Changes to local hydrology caused by large-scale perennial systems may be complex, and thus require careful evaluation. For example, the drawdown of soil water and enhanced evapotranspiration from perennial relative to annual cropping systems could lead to long-term depletion of the soil-water column, as well as changes in clouds and rainfall in downwind locales. Quantifying local and remote consequences for hydrology and climate resulting from a shift from annual to perennial bioenergy crops is therefore required if longterm sustainability of biomass production is to be attained.

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Energy Working Group: Heidi Hjaernet on the Petroleum Sector Management in Azerbaijan

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Heidi Kjærnet will be presenting her paper "Petroleum sector management in Azerbaijan: A case study of the national oil company SOCAR". The paper focuses on the interactions between the Azerbaijani government and the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan, SOCAR, and explores the complex interconnections between the government and its national oil company (NOC). In the post-Soviet period, SOCAR has played the role as the national partner in consortiums with international oil companies producing oil and gas fields in Azerbaijan, as well as having important policy tasks and social responsibilities.

The paper argues that there is a profound lack of separation of commercial and regulatory responsibility in the Azerbaijani petroleum sector. While Azerbaijan is certainly giving preferential treatment to SOCAR, Heidi argues Baku is less likely to follow the example of Kazakhstan in pursuing a resource nationalist line through curtailing the activities of international oil companies due to the Azerbaijani government's ambitions for regional leadership in the South Caucasus, and its strong commitment to cooperating with the international oil companies.

Heidi's research on SOCAR and Azerbaijan is a part of her PhD dissertation with the working title "Petroleum, politics and power: The National Oil Companies of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Russia".

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Heidi Kjærnet is a Fulbright Visiting Researcher at the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD) at Stanford University.  She is visiting from the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and the Fridtjof Nansen Institute where she is a Research Fellow.

She holds an MA in Russia and Post-Soviet Affairs from the University of Oslo. She has taken intensive Russian language courses at the Norwegian Center in St Petersburg and interned at the Royal Norwegian Embassy to Azerbaijan. Currently she is a PhD student in Political Science at the University of Tromso.

Encina Hall
Stanford University

Heidi Kjaernet

The Program on Energy and Sustainable Development
616 Serra St.
Encina Hall East
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 724-1714 (650) 724-1717
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PhD Student at the University of Tromso
Heidi_Kjærnet_Sept_2010.jpg MA

Heidi Kjærnet is a Fulbright Visiting Researcher at the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD) at Stanford University.  She is visiting from the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and the Fridtjof Nansen Institute where she is a Research Fellow.

At PESD Heidi is working on her research project on the National Oil Companies of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Russia, focusing on how these post-Soviet governments manage their oil and gas sectors. The project aims to contribute to our knowledge on state-business relations in the post-Soviet area as well as on the governments' strategies and capacities in managing their important petroleum sectors.  The project's theoretical ambition is to explore the usefulness of principal-agent theory in authoritarian contexts.

Heidi's previous research has included work on the potential for renewable energy in Russia, the interconnections between energy relations and foreign policy strategies in Azerbaijani-Russian relations, and on the community of internally displaced persons in Azerbaijan in light of the country's oil boom.

Heidi holds an MA in Russia and Post-Soviet Affairs from the University of Oslo. She has taken intensive Russian language courses at the Norwegian Center in St Petersburg and interned at the Royal Norwegian Embassy to Azerbaijan. Currently she is a PhD student in Political Science at the University of Tromso.

Fulbright Visiting Researcher
Heidi Kjaernet Speaker
Seminars

Role of Risk Informed Methods for Critical Nuclear Infrastructure

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Edward Blandford is a Postdoctoral Fellow at CISAC. His research focuses on nuclear reactor design at the system level as it impacts security issues for future nuclear infrastructure. In particular, his interests involve the design of advanced reactors with an emphasis on security, emergency preparedness, threat of theft of material, and international safeguards. This work also focuses on the utilization of risk analysis early in the reactor design process to ensure that safety, security, and structural functional requirements are met reliably. In addition to security applications, other research interests include nuclear reactor thermal-hydraulics in support of the safety of nuclear installations, probabilistic risk assessment, performance-based regulation, best-estimate code verification and validation, and material degradation management.

Before coming to CISAC, Edward was a graduate student researcher in the Nuclear Engineering Department at the University of California at Berkeley. His Ph.D. dissertation focused on the design of reduced-scale experiments for advanced high temperature reactors and their role in validating computational models. He received his M.S. in nuclear engineering from UC Berkeley in 2008.

Prior to pursuing graduate work, he worked at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) as a project manager in the Steam Generator Management Program where he managed all thermal-hydraulics related research activity. While at EPRI, Edward worked on a variety of industry-related activities related to material degradation issues and improving plant management.  

Edward studied mechanical engineering at the University of California at Los Angles where he earned a B.S. in 2002. During this period of time, he held Department of Energy research fellowships at both Brookhaven National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory working on nuclear and particle physics applications respectively.

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Edward Blandford Postdoctoral Fellow Speaker CISAC
Seminars

New PESD Working Paper details challenges of designing carbon offsets for the transportation sector

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Programs to enlist developing countries in climate change mitigation by granting credits for carbon emissions reductions across entire sectors like transportation are quite appealing in principle. However, as researcher Adam Millard-Ball shows in PESD Working Paper #97, "Adverse Selection in an Opt-In Emissions Trading Program: The Case of Sectoral Crediting for Transportation, " any practical implementation of such schemes would entail thorny trade offs between economic efficiency, environmental effectiveness, and political acceptability.

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.

Countries would generate tradable emission credits (offsets) for reducing emissions in a sector below an agreed crediting baseline. However, large uncertainties in the regulator's predictions of the counterfactual business-as-usual baseline are likely to render sectoral no-lose targets an extremely unattractive mechanism in practice, at least for the transportation case study presented here. Given these uncertainties, the regulator faces a tradeoff between efficiency (setting generous crediting baselines to encourage more countries to opt in) and limiting transfer payments for non-additional offsets (which are generated if the crediting baseline is set above business-as-usual).

The first-best outcome is attainable through setting a generous crediting baseline. However, this comes at the cost of either increased environmental damage (if developed country targets are not adjusted to account for non-additional offsets), or transfers from developed to developing countries that are likely to be too high to be politically feasible (if developed country targets are made more stringent in recognition that many offsets are nonadditional). A more stringent crediting baseline still generates a large proportion of non-additional offsets, but renders sectoral no-lose targets virtually irrelevant as few countries opt in.

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