Leasing Policy and the Rate of Petroleum Development: Analysis with a Monte Carlo Simulation Model

摘要

The study has two objectives: first, to consider whether alternative leasing systems are desirable to speed the rate of oil and gas exploration and development in frontier basins; second, to evaluate the Petroleum Activity and Decision Simulation model developed by the US Department of the Interior for economic and land use planning and for policy analysis. Analysis of the model involved structural variation of the geology, exploration, and discovery submodels and also involved a formal sensitivity analysis using the Latin Hypercube Sampling Method. We report the rate of exploration, discovery, and petroleum output under a variety of price, leasing policy, and tax regimes. (ERA citation 07:045670)