چگونه اکتشاف پناهگاه ملی حیات وحش قطب شمال بر رفتار اوپک تاثیر می گذارد؟ مطالعه شبیه سازی حلقه باز کرنات-نش

Exploring petroleum reserves in the Alaskan Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) has been proposed to reduce the dependence on foreign oil and to ease the energy shortage in the United States. To investigate the impacts of the ANWR exploration on strategic behavior of OPEC members, a calibrated dynamic model of oligopolistic competition and cartel collusion in the U.S. petroleum market is built in this paper. Numerical simulations on an open-loop game are used here to examine the scope and magnitude of strategic interactions between OPEC's decisions and ANWR exploration. The simulation results show that OPEC's strategic postures have much stronger effects on the U.S. petroleum market than the ANWR exploration. The simulations in this paper indicate that preventing cartel collusion by OPEC is more effective than the ANWR exploration in alleviating short petroleum supplies of the United States in the near future.

Petroleum supplies to the United States have experienced numerous shocks in the past three decades. After the 1989 Gulf War, the real price of petroleum has been stable for ten years. However, world oil price suddenly surged from about $10 per barrel in March to more than $20 per barrel in December during 1999. In early 2003, oil prices climb to over $30 per barrel range. The Iraqi War and rapid growth of Chinese economy sent world oil price over $60 per barrel in 2005. Negative impacts of high oil prices have permeated into the U.S. economy. Temporary interruption of oil production in the gulf caused by hurricane Katrina shows that the U.S. economy and consumer confidences are vulnerable to oil supply shocks. After Bush came to the office in 2001, proposals of exploring new domestic oil reserves in environmentally sensitive areas, such as the Alaskan Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (known as ANWR) and offshore reserves in California and Mexican Bay, receive revived attentions. Opening the ANWR for exploration is one of the key components in the Bush administration's new energy plan. Some people argue that such exploration activities can reduce the dependency of the U.S. economy on the OPEC oil imports, others say not. Under strong pressure from high oil prices, the Congress passed the Energy Bill in 2005 that opens ANWR for oil production. Such measures represent long-standing viewpoints of the Bush administration. Not surprisingly, the energy policies of the Bush administration are controversial. Whether the ANWR oil productions, at the expenses of potential environmental damages, can effectively reduce the demand for oil imports and stabilize the oil price, is the crucial question to be answered. The United States has relied heavily on foreign oil in the past. The OPEC countries are major suppliers to the U.S. market. In 2004, the U.S. produced 5.419 million barrels per day (MMBD) of crude oil, and consumed 20.731MMBD of oil products. 57.8% of total consumption was imported. The share of OPEC members were 47.4% in the total imports (EIA, 2005). Because of its importance to the U.S. and world economy, strategic behavior of OPEC, especially its cartel (or lack of) structure, has been studied extensively (for example, see Adelman, 1993, Adelman, 1995, Griffin, 1985, Alhajji and Huettner, 2000 and Gulen, 1996). Independent studies suggest that the OPEC has been a successful cartel in the recent past. Modeling the U.S. energy system is a complicated task. To assess and forecast energy supply and demand, U.S. Department of Energy has maintained a large-scale general equilibrium model, called “National Energy Modeling System” (NEMS), for many years (EIA, 2001). Many smaller energy modeling endeavors have been undertaken in academia to address a variety of energy issues. Representative works include a series of researches presented at the Energy Modeling Forum, sponsored by Stanford University (Energy Modeling Forum, 1982 and Energy Modeling Forum, 1992), among others. ANWR exploration poses an interesting, yet challenging problem for energy modeling. It will take several years before potential ANWR oil field forms a sizeable production capacity. Can these new domestic supplies available a decade later affect the OPEC's behavior in the near future? The answer to this question seems not simple or clear-cut. Conventional general equilibrium and econometric modeling approaches are inadequate for dealing with strategic behavior of energy suppliers. Characterizing interactions between the OPEC behavior and the ANWR exploration in an open-loop dynamic game, is an appropriate method for modeling this type of intertemporal strategic interactions. The dynamic Cournot-Nash game has been used to characterize exhaustible resource industries and to address strategic aspects of the OPEC behavior vs. the U.S. economy, such as in Salant (1976), Karp and Newbery (1991), Ulph and Folie (1980), Griffin and Neilson (1994). Oligopoly, as a prevailing market structure in exhaustible resource industries, has also been studies extensively and is summarized in major texts (see Dasgupta and Heal, 1979 and Hartwick, 1989). These succinct and stylized game-theoretic models are very useful for resolving certain theoretic and/or policy issues of exhaustible resources. However, game-theoretic models need to be calibrated with the data from the real world to answer policy issues directly. In this paper, we develop an open-loop Cournot-Nash game model of an exhaustible resource industry that supplies the U.S. petroleum market. The OPEC members, other foreign oil producers, and the U.S. domestic suppliers are simultaneously deciding their optimal oil production paths, facing a common demand function and the respective stock constraints. The ANWR exploration is treated as a foreseeable future supply shock in the U.S. market. The players either compete with one another or collude within a bloc to maximize their profits. Different from the previous game-theoretic models of exhaustible resources, the model here is calibrated with the data from real world, fitted with EIA's short-run forecasting and solved numerically. The numerical solutions of strategic profiles in various scenarios are simulated through an equilibrium searching algorithm. Different from conventional CGE models and simulation models in which demands and supplies determine the solution, the drivers of solution profiles of this model are strategic interactions among the regions. With this model, we attempt to answer several key questions concerning the ANWR exploration and its impacts on the U.S. oil market the short-run. The questions include: How will the OPEC members react to the potential increases of the U.S. domestic supply in the near future? What is the likely magnitude of their reactions? How does such an announcement (of future exploration) affect the OPEC's cartel collusion? Does the ANWR exploration (and production) reduce the reliance of the U.S. economy on foreign imports? The numerical simulations of the game theoretic model in this paper offer some interesting findings. Our simulations show that the ANWR exploration will increase the domestic oil production in the U.S. (evidently), but has negligible impacts on foreign suppliers' strategic behavior. The alternative market structures, such as oligopolistic competition or OPEC cartel collusion, have stronger impacts on the U.S. petroleum supplies in the near future. The United States will continue relying on foreign oil. Import substitution effect of the ANWR exploration is negligible. Nevertheless, the ANWR exploration will slightly weaken the power that binds the OPEC cartel. The remaining portions of the paper are organized as follows. Section 2 introduces the model, its data sources, model calibrations, model scope, and its limitation. Section 3 describes the scenario designs and solution algorithm. Section 4 presents and analyzes the simulation results. Section 5 contains concluding remarks.

In this paper, we studied the impacts of the ANWR exploration on OPEC's strategic behavior in the near future. Using game theoretic simulations, we examine the strategic behavior of petroleum suppliers to U.S. petroleum market under both oligopolistic competition and OPEC collusion scenarios. The simulation results show that the ANWR exploration has negligible influence on foreign petroleum suppliers' strategic behavior. Particularly, if OPEC members decide to form a cartel (it has been one), they will hold back production and reduce the supplies to the U.S. market. The increased domestic supplies from ANWR exploration are not sufficient to offset such reduction. Policy implications from this simulative study are straightforward. Using the United States' political and economic strength and wisdom to disintegrate the OPEC cartel, is much more effective to ensure stable petroleum supply. Although the ANWR exploration can increase domestic production, its magnitude cannot change the basic fact that the U.S. will continue relying on foreign oil. The ANWR exploration will place the United States in a disadvantageous strategic position. Balancing pros and cons, the ANWR exploration should not be a prior choice for solving near-term energy problems faced by the United States. Other important factors not discussed in this research, such as the environment, energy conservation, and renewable energy alternatives, will make our conclusion even stronger