OverviewSecuity of gas supply (used interchangeably with energy security) gains more and more importance with every gascrisis. Therefore, majority of the scientific research in this area roots in politics, while economics’, perspective is stillmissing. Shale gas fever that started in the US has already translated itself into fuel abundance and power shifts ininternational markets.Thus, presented research offers a closer look at the natural gas supply security from the economics’ perspective witha focus on the US market. That allows for an extenstion of an existing security of supply theory. Analysis includesthe case-study for US in period 1983-2014.The paper is organised as follows: after the introduction, the second section gives a brief overview about the theoryof security of supply.The third section describes methodology that has been used in the paper, while in the fourthsection, I present the conducted research and its results. In the final section policy implications are derived.MethodologyIn the theoretical layer study uses critical literature review. I employ logical synthesis and analysis in order tothoroughly investigate the security of supply idea. The complexity of the phenomenon makes it difficult to assess inits all dimensions quantitatively.Such an successful attempt to determine factors influencing the energy security was undertaken by Erdal (2015).Therefore in the empirical layer, the study uses Erdal approach. Analysis relies on the regression with the time-seriesdata and covers unconventional gas extraction in the USA between 1983 and 2014. I estimate three different timeseriesregression equations including different sets of determinants and afterwards choosing the best modelaccordingly to models’ information criteria. All models are diagnosed against their stationarity.ResultsFirst, study investigates the theoretical aspects of the energy security phenomenon. Even though, the notion isbroadly investigated (Winzer, 2012; Ang, Choong Ng, 2015) there is no common understanding what energysecurity really is, that is why it is often described as a “blurred concept” (Loeschel, Moslener Ruebbelke, 2010).Study sums up existing theoretical efforts in this area and offers framework to assess the phenomenon of security ofsupply in the natural gas market.Second, among different measures used to assess the energy security, I chose the above mentioned Erdal’s approach.This method includes not only fuel production, consumption, and its environmental aspects but also its relation tocompetitive energy resources. This original framework is extended to natural gas market with inclusion of themacroeconomic data. For the US natural gas market, that includes among others statistics referring to unconventionalgas drillings/reserves, renewables’ consumption and GDP.Third, the result of empirical study suggests that security of gas supply in the American market improved within theanalysed period. That was possible mainly to intensive shale gas production. Some of the variables followed theresults of the original research but some of those that were extended for natural gas market behaved differently thanexpected. That refers especially to predictors describing renewables’s use.ConclusionsShale gas production in the US changed the natural gas market once fo all. That is true both for the domestic US andinternational market. At the global level it is visible in the form availability of additional fuel quantities extendingprice pressure and at the domestic (US) level one of the effects include influence over security of gas supply.It has been proved through an empirical assessment that with increased domestic production US energy securityimproves. However, it is not the number of drillings that causes it but rather incremental growth in natural gasreserves. That shows how time-delayed is an effect of any additional drillings policy. Surprisingly, study revealscounter-intuitive relation between energy security and wind energy consumption, showing its inverse proportionality.This result presents far reaching policy implications as wind and natural gas are said to be complementary fuels.
展开▼
