A Financial Option Perspective on Energy Security and Strategic Storage

Lawrence Haar, Laura Haar

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    Abstract

    On the whole, research into energy security falls into one of three perspectives: The political perspective, the engineering and geologic perspective, or the economic perspective emphasising market resilience. Common to these perspectives is the emphasis upon examining exposure to supply disruption, but not its probability of occurrence. As petroleum markets have shown themselves generally resilient to secular events and actual disruptions rare, despite perennial concerns, we ask if our understanding of security cannot be improved? We apply financial option theory to three eventful periods to learn the expectations of market participants on the probability of disruptions. We find the forward-looking views of petroleum market participants to be accurate with regard to both price persistence and the resilience of markets in absorbing shocks. Our results cast doubt upon the need for emergency inventories unless justified to dampen market volatility on public good grounds.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)65-74
    Number of pages9
    JournalEnergy Strategy Review
    Volume25
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 31 May 2019

    Bibliographical note

    © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/BY-NC-ND/4.0/).T

    Keywords

    • Energy security
    • Strategic inventories
    • Financial options and risk neutral density functions

    Fingerprint

    Dive into the research topics of 'A Financial Option Perspective on Energy Security and Strategic Storage'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

    Cite this