Economic Valuation of the Gas Buyback Contracts in South Pars Field through Comparing with Production Sharing Contracts

Signing Oil Contracts with international oil companies for upstream and downstream operations in Iran's oil industry has a long history. After the discovery of oil, the first international oil contract was signed in Iran. Different types of oil contracts have been used in Iran. In most cases, the adequacy of contracts in terms of economic benefits has raised questions and ambiguities for Iran. To investigate this topic, the gas buyback contracts are evaluated from an economic point of view. In order to assess the results more carefully, these contracts are compared with the Production Sharing Contracts. Phases 2 and 3, and also 4 and 5 of South Pars Gas Field have been selected for this paper. Since these projects have been awarded in the form of buy-back contract, in addition of defining different scenarios, the Production Sharing Contract for the project has been simulated. After finding the best scenario in terms of the production sharing contracts for both projects, we found that for phases 2 and 3 of the South Pars, the Production Sharing Contract and for phases 4 and 5, the buyback contract, are proved to be more favorable for Iran

The Impact of Oil Price Shocks on Growth and Inflation of OPEC Countries with an Emphasis on OPEC Political Risk Shocks

Considering the source of oil shocks, this study aims to investigate the effect of oil price shocks on the key macroeconomic variables of the OPEC countries. Even though oil shocks are originated by various factors, political risks are of great importance. Using structural vector-autoregressive model, we disentangled oil shocks and studied their impacts on OPEC’s GDP growth and inflation, using a Panel-VAR for 1994:1-2016:4. Our results highlight that among oil shocks, the oil price shocks stemming from the political risk of OPEC countries have the most significant impact on the OPEC's economic growth, while not having any significant impact on inflation of the countries. We also learned that oil supply shocks could also boost economic growth and increase inflation rates in OPEC countries, although these increases are not significant. Other oil price shocks will only lead to higher inflation in these countries without affecting OPEC's economic growth