Keywords: Danube; Black Sea; Oil; natural gas; Romania; Ukraine; Ukrainian Foreign Ministry; TOL; Crimean Petroleum Company
How a couple of kilometers of barren rock becomes worth $4 billion and a diplomatic headache for NATO and the EU.
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Keywords: oil policy; oil crisis; communism; Romania; Ceauşescu
This paper achieves two things: first, it establishes the existence of a certain pattern of analysis, which I will call an academic canon, of analyzing the problems caused by the oil crises of the 1970’s on the economy of Communist Romania. The canon seems to hold that a series of economic decisions taken in the 1960’s and 70’s by the communist leadership concerning the vast expansion of the petroleum industry led to huge problems after the enormous increases in the price of oil at the end of the 1970’s, which led to the virtual destruction of the economy and the huge deprivations of the 1980’s, thus helping to explain the popular rejection of the socialist regime. Secondly, it analyzes what the Romanian communist leadership thought of the oil industry and what was their general strategy related to it. The general conclusion of the paper is that a deeper research on the party documents and economic policies leads to a wider understanding not only of the world view of the Romanian communist leaders, but also to nuances when describing the economic causes of political and social change.
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Keywords: oil; economic crisis; USA; Barack Obama;
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Keywords: biofuels; oil; energetic security; sustainability; blending mandates.
Oil dominates our world energetic mix and this aspect is especially visible in the transportation sector with over 90% of the fuel supply being represented by oil. Due to the geographic concentration of oil reserves, assuring energetic security becomes a challenge for countries short of resources. Biofuels are liquid or gaseous fuels derived from biomass. Energy crops can be specially harvested for this purpose and thus a renewable resource is available. Due to climate change considerations, biofuels use can reduce GHG emissions. Originating from agricultural feedstocks biofuels can offer an alternative market for these commodities. Governments have developed biofuels instruments, such as blending mandates, in order to improve their energetic security, replace oil and maintain the agricultural feedstock prices. The present paper analyzes the opportunity of using biofuels regarding their sustainability, competitiveness and their potential to improve energetic security.
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Keywords: protection of competition; oil and oil derivatives market; concentration indicators;concentration
It is generally known that the market represents the overall relationship between supply and demand. The relations between these two are constantly intertwining and are constantly influenced by different factors. Depending on their relationship as well as on factors specific to a particular economy, there are different market conditions, such as: monopoly, oligopoly, limited oligopoly, limited competition, perfect competition, etc. The liberalization of the domestic oil and oil derivatives market represents an open space for creating a high-quality competitive relationship. However, the course of strengthening the competitive relationship should be carried out considerably faster. Market conditions and competitiveness are in practice determined by the concentration in the observed market. Competition is in a particular relevant market expressed by a number of concentration indicators. Thus, an important aspect of the analysis of competitiveness intensity in the domestic oil market is measuring the concentration of supply, which will be analyzed in this paper. It can be said that every market is characterized by a certain level of competitiveness among market participants, and through these competitive relationships, their market power permeates. The research uses concentration indicators to show the concentration in the domestic oil and oil derivatives market, its current features and also to analyze the potential of strengthening the competitive relationship in the future.
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Keywords: Oil;energy;Russia; China;pipeline
Russia’s oil exports are in decline, and with the construction of the new Eastern Siberia-Pacific Ocean (ESPO) pipeline, the countries of Central Europe are set to be among those most af ected.
More...Keywords: Slovenia; 1990-2004;oil industry;oil;economy;energy industry; liquid fuels;natural gas;coal industry;electricity industry;
In the following article the author presents oil and gas economy, the position and role of this energy industry in Slovenia. Slovenia does not produce crude oil and gas and imports all of the required quantities. Production in the northeast of Slovenia, where the Lendava rafinery operated until the year 2000, is symbolic. Slovenia only produces methanol from the imported natural gas, and two oil pipelines are relevant for this country. Even though crude oil production and research in this area has a tradition in Slovenia, lasting for several decades, these fields had been developed especially until 1963, when the federal fund for research in the field of crude oil and gas production was abolished. Among other issues the article also focuses on the structure of final energy consumption, where liquid fuels represent the largest percentage, followed by natural gas. The Slovenian market for liquid fuels and natural gas is relatively small. However, one of the characteristics of the Slovenian liquid fuels market is a sufficient number of modern and ecologically-aware filling stations.
More...Keywords: crisis; oil price; extraction; oil consumption; military conflict; petrodollar;
The subject of this article is oil considered as an industrial raw material and a financial asset. The study of the development pathway of the global economy has shown that the global financial system is about to witness new virtual money and the financial instruments that may make oil non- demanded. The article analyzes the regularities reflected in oil price to understand the possibility of the crisis related to this situation. The article identifies the groups of factors directly or indirectly influencing oil and its price, which has enabled to establish their complicated correlation. Besides, it shows that the price of oil as a financial asset is greatly influenced today by the factors specific for the financial sphere.
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Keywords: Ukraine; Ukrainian politics; Oil and Gas; Ukrainian political system;
The oil industry does not play a major role in the Ukrainian energy sector and has smaller economic and political significance than the gas, coal and nuclear sectors. The issues linked to the Ukrainian fuel sector are rarely given publicity in the mass media. Meanwhile, a comprehensive analysis reveals that there has been a painful and durable collapse in this strategic branch of the economy. What once was a powerful Ukrainian refining sector has been plunged into deep crisis for years. Only one out of the six existing refineries is currently in operation, using only a small section of its production capacity. For years all the refining companies have suffered from underinvestment, have not been modernised and have been unable to produce fuels in the quantities and at the quality required by the market. Another problem that has remained unresolved for years is the supply of crude oil to be processed. As a result, Ukrainian refineries are the most outdated in Europe, and the oil processing output in Ukraine has reached a record-low level of around 2.5 million tonnes annually. At the same time, the market share of imported fuels over the past few years has reached 80–85% of total consumption. A significant part of the imports originates from Russia. It is difficult to expect that the situation in the Ukrainian fuel sector will improve to a significant degree in the coming years. Its condition is also a good case study laying bare the numerous weaknesses of the Ukrainian state.
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Keywords: Harr à Trous wavelet; neural network; back propagation; crude oil price forecasting; activation function; input-hidden nodes
Oil price prediction has usually proved to be an intractable task, due to the intrinsic complexity of the oil market mechanism. In addition, the recent oil shock and its consequences re-launch the debate on understanding the behavior underlying the expected oil prices. Combining the dynamic properties of multilayer back propagation neural network and the recent Harr à Trous wavelet decomposition, a Hybrid model HTW-MPNN is implemented to achieve prominent modeling of crude oil price. While recent studies focus on the determination of the best model by comparing various neural architectures or applying several decomposition techniques to the ANN, the new insight of this chapteris to target the issue of the transfer function selection. Based on the work of authors Yonaba H. Anctil F. and Fortin, V., from the year 2010 “Comparing Sigmoid Transfer Functions for Neural Network Multistep Ahead Stream flow forecasting”(published in the Journal of Hydrologic Engineering, April, 275-283), we use three variants of activations function namely sigmoid, bipolar sigmoid and hyperbolic tangent in order to test the model’s flexibility. Furthermore, the forecasting robustness is checked through several levels of input-hidden nodes. Comparatively, simulation results of Hybrid model performs better than the conventional BPNN.
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Keywords: WTI Price; Brent Price;
Oil is one of the most important and liquid commodities, which development is highly focused by traders and theoretical economists. The practice showed that change in oil prices is positive correlated with inflation, when there is even indirect influence of oil because oil is oil necessary in delivering goods. Prices of oil influences positive the energetically stocks and negative with airlines stocks. The most important prices are formed in New York WTI crude oil and in London Brent oil.
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Keywords: hubbert's curve; hubbert's linearization; oil production; oil depletion; Ghana;
This paper seeks to investigate the potential peak production of oil in Ghana beyond which declining production occurs. Ghana has over the years explored the possibilities of producing oil but major discoveries and subsequent commercial production began in 2010. As important as this resource is to the quest for economic transformation and diversification of the Ghanaian economy, its usage should also take into consideration challenges of depletion. This is so relevant given the fact that, the country needs to make plans that will cover the future generations.
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Keywords: asset pricing; oil price; time varying beta;
We investigate the factors influencing returns of European oil and gas companies. Our data set consist of 60 European oil and gas firms: 39 representing developed Western European countries and 21 from Central and Eastern Europe. We run regressions for the following market equilibrium models: standard CAPM, Fama-French three-factor model, Carhart four-factor model and Pastor-Stambaugh five-factor model using different variables as a market proxy, furthermore we extend all the models with the oil price as well. We also distinct different situations regarding the movement of general market prices, and oil price as well to examine regime dependency of the applied model.
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Keywords: Gamos workshop; terracotta lamps; Cyrenaica; Crete
During almost ten years of Polish excavations in Ptolemais (Libya), a signifi cant number of terracotta lamps from the Roman Imperial period have been discovered. While searching for supra-regional parallels, it appeared that most of the analogies were found on Crete within a group of locally produced lamps attributed to the workshop of Gamos, operating in the second century AD. This led to an attempt to collect information on all known forms and decorative motifs attributed to the above-mentioned workshop. The finds from Ptolemais presented here constitute an important group in light of still on-going discussion on the provenance, functioning and distribution of lamps signed ΓΑΜΟΥ, and in a broader context, provide a glimpse on the relations between both parts of the province.
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Keywords: oil pollution in Black Sea; SAR; ocean remote sensing
This study focuses on the case of the underwater oil leak form the ship Mopang, sunk in 1921 near the city Sozopol on the Bulgarian coast. In the summer of 2018, some of its engine fuel was released and reached the coast, gaining significant public and media attention. The available Sentinel-1 radar images for the affected region for the years 2017 and 2018 are processed and the results show that oil leaks were visible as early as February 2017. Significant amount of oily discharge was detected during the summer months of both years. During the rest of the year there were occasional discharges, without accumulation during particular periods.The sunken ship Mopang is used as a verified case to demonstrate the capability of remote sensing techniques for reliable detection of oil pollution on the sea surface in small scales close to the shoreline, combining radar and optical data. Sentinel-1 and 2 images, together with drone acquisitions are analysed, discussing the benefits of each method and taking into consideration the particularities of the region of interest. Based on the availability of radar acquisitions with detected oil slicks twice a day at 4 am and 4 pm for some days, we have investigated the evolution of the detected oil slick on the sea surface, depending on the marine meteorological conditions.
More...Keywords: responsability; performance; oil industry; non-financial information;
In this paper we highlight the role of non-financial information contained in sustainability reports for a complex analysis of a company's performance structured on the three main components: economic, social and environmental. In order to achieve this goal, we set out to analyse the overall performance of a company in the oil industry, as this field of activity involves more complex responsibilities on the part of companies operating in this sector and is therefore more relevant.
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Keywords: sunflower oil; epoxidation; thermoset resins; acrylation; Oxirane Oxygen Content;
This report is based on the synthesis of thermoset resins from sunflower oil. Sunflower oil with an iodine value of 120 g I / 100 g oil containing 30 % oleic acid and 59 % linoleic acid was epoxidized by reaction with a peroxy acid (formed in-situ by the reaction between hydrogen peroxide and formic acid). The ratio of ethylenic unsaturation to hydrogen peroxide to formic acid used was 1:1.5:0.5. The maximum conversion of iodine generated was 82.45 % for seven h of epoxidation at 65 °C, and the oxirane oxygen content at that same condition was 4.6 %. Thermoset resins synthesized from sunflower oil were further modified using acrylic acid. All the resins generated were characterized using FT-IR spectroscopy. The results showed that the generated resins could be used in composite production for automobile, construction, and furniture applications.
More...Keywords: oil congresses; Council of the Oil Congress; Baku oilmen (industrialists); Baku Branch of Imperial Russian Technical Society; Baku-Batum pipeline; Nobels and Rothschild companies;
A lot of companies, large and small, sprung up during Baku’s first oil boom in the 19th century. Though rivalry was often fierce, the oil industrialists soon realized that they could advance many of their interests better through co-operation than competition. Thus, the first Congress of Baku Oil Industrialists was held from 26 October to 8 November 1884. The congresses continued to function more or less every year up to the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. At that time Baku was part of imperial Russia and the biggest names in the empire’s oil industry – the Nobels and Rothschilds – took part in the Baku congresses, a sign of the meetings’ importance.
More...Keywords: high molecular weight compounds of oils; resins and asphaltenes; inhibiting properties; microelements; catalytic poisons; waste production;
The article discusses the environmental aspects of the use of oil and oil components. It is shown that for the most complete solution of applied problems in oil and gas production, taking into account the preservation of ecological biodiversity (meaning a decrease in anthropogenic environmental pollution), it is important to know the qualitative composition of the used hydrocarbon raw materials.
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