Indian energy security status: what are the economic and environmental implications?

India's energy system is facing a rapidly increasing energy deficit despite the government's keen attention in developing renewable sources of energy, especially nuclear, solar and wind. Statistics from British Petroleum (BP) (2015) reveal that fossil fuels constitute more than 90% of the nation's Total Primary Energy Consumption (TPEC) with coal accounting for 56%, while crude oil and natural gas contributes 28% and 7%, respectively. This couples with the fact that India heavily depends on foreign energy to meet its domestic energy needs. The purpose of this paper is to examine the economic and environmental implications of energy supply insecurity in India by accessing the extent to which the country's primary energy sources are efficient and diversified. The paper is structured into five sections, including this Introduction. Section 2 provides an overview of the economic, energy and environmental situation in India. Section 3 presents the methodology and results of key energy security indicators adopted. While Section 4 presents the results of the analysis performed on the considered energy security indicators, Section 5 concludes the study

Oil price shocks and Nigeria's economic activity: evidence from ARDL co-integration and VECM analysis.

This study examines the impact of oil price shocks and their transmission channels to selected macroeconomic variables which serve as proxies for economic activities in Nigeria using quarterly data from 1980Q1 to 2011Q4. Empirical analysis was carried out using VAR framework. Further the Impulse response function (IRF) and the variance decomposition (VDC) were carried out to trace the impact of oil shocks to the Nigerian economy. The result shows that oil price shocks have negative impact on nearly all the variables used in the analysis; furthermore the asymmetric relationship between oil price shocks and GDP was not established as the effects was found to be minimal in all the tests results. The result clearly illustrates that oil price decreases affects most of the macroeconomic indicators than increases. Specifically, oil price decrease affects trade balance, inflation, government revenue and exchange rate. The implications are that oil price decreases affects macroeconomic activity in Nigeria than increases as most of the variables except inflation did not respond to increases. Based on the findings it was recommended that a relaxation of monetary policy during an oil price fluctuation era as the government has already through the central bank adopted a inflation targeting policy in order to protect the economy from possible outcome of a full blown stagflation amongst others

Protecting natural gas investments: trends in investment treaties and investors projections in Africa.

Natural gas is increasingly gaining prominence in Africa’s energy landscape. It has now surpassed coal to become the leading electricity generation fuel providing roughly 40% of Africa’s electricity generation requirements. Consequently, investments in natural gas have been escalating on the African continent. This has necessitated the various international, regional, and national initiatives and mechanisms to protect these investments from both legal and socio-political risks. Given the long-term nature of oil and gas projects, investors often insist on contractual and treaty mechanisms for protecting their investments from economic, legal, and geopolitical risks. Whereas various investments in the African energy sector have been witnessed in different countries, this chapter will focus on natural gas investments. The chapter analyses the various investment protection mechanisms for natural gas investments, especially taking cognisance of the various transition risks associated with the ongoing global move to transition to low carbon energy systems, which is characterised by laws and policies which are likely to change the energy business structure globally. The chapter draws examples from different African countries with respect to investment treaties and national mechanisms for protecting natural gas investments

Analysis of Pedestrian Accident Injury-Severities at Road Junctions and Crossings using an Advanced Random Parameter Modelling Framework: The Case of Scotland

This paper investigates the determinants of injury severities in pedestrian-motor vehicle accidents at signalised and unsignalised junctions, and at physically-controlled and human-controlled crossings in Scotland. The accident data were drawn from the official police crash report database of the UK spanning a period between 2010 and 2018. Correlated random parameter ordered probit models with heterogeneity in the means were developed in order to account for the multi-layered impact of unobserved heterogeneity on statistical estimation. The model estimation results showed that the severities of accident injuries are affected by roadway, location, weather, vehicle, and driver characteristics as well as temporal attributes (including time and day of the accident). Factors such as the urban context, lighting and weather conditions and road surface conditions were found to result in correlated random parameters, thus capturing the intricate, yet interactive effects of unobserved heterogeneity, and particularly the unobserved behavioural response of road users to different traffic control types at junctions and crossings. Vehicle type, driver’s gender and day-of-the-week were observed to influence the random parameters' distributions. Empirically, the results showcase variations in the determinants of injury severities at signalised and unsignalised junctions, and at physically-controlled and human-controlled crossings. Even though most of these variations were related to the magnitude of impact of the determinants, differences in the directional effects on injury severities were also identified, mainly for factors related to weather conditions, hazard presence on the road, and temporal characteristics of the accidents

Comparative Analysis of Upstream Petroleum Fiscal Systems of Three (3) Petroleum Exporting Countries: Indonesia, Nigeria and Malaysia

The role of oil: its output and infrastructure and technology in the world are established. Exploration and Exploitation of oil is not only significant as a revenue generator but has become indispensible in the world economy especially as a result of the inability of world economy to find a better substitute. The recent decline and fluctuation arising from oil sector over the decades have prompted a reassessment of petroleum fiscal systems. The research compares the current upstream fiscal systems of three oil exporting countries: Nigeria, Indonesia and Malaysia. The approach adopted for this study is a review of the existing literature on fiscal regimes; the focus is an objective presentation of empirical evidence. The methodology involved desktop research which looked into published literature. Based on the evaluation, the paper arrived at possible conclusions and implications for oil fiscal regimes for the respective countries and the world fiscal systems in general

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Energy security and economic performance of the caspian region: how vulnerable is the region to the falling oil price?

Given the prime position of oil in Caspian economy, change in oil prices has become a crucial issue with significant implications on the development of the economies in the region. The oil and gas producing states in the Caspian region have experienced meaningful economic growth under high energy prices in the last decade. Now with the recent sudden and precipitous drop in global crude oil prices, this study examines the degree of vulnerability of the Caspian states economy to oil shocks, alongside associated economic and environmental challenges