درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The challenge of environmental pollution and climate change have made countries to develop energy transition progress to move from non-renewable energy sources towards renewable ones. This paper seeks to consider energy transformation process and analyze its pattern in Iran by modeling through the ARDL bounding testing method over the period of 1993-2018. The empirical estimations depicted that in the long-run economic growth and inflation rate negatively impact on energy transformation of Iran, while increase in carbon dioxide emissions and appreciation of Iran’s national currency accelerate the energy transition process in Iran. Regarding the short-run relationship, the major results represented an evidence of positive impact of exchange rate on Iran’s energy transition process, while the other variables have negative coefficient. As a major concluding remark, for the case of Iran, the findings prove that the influential impacts of explanatory variables on energy transformation are stronger in long-run rather than in short-run. Therefore, the presence of efficient long-run energy planning is recommended.

Blockchain technology can bring opportunities, such as reducing transaction business costs and increasing transparency to the oil and gas industry. This model is adopted as a public maturity model in business processes, industry, and IS/IT organizations. This model is classified into five levels of emerging, identified, defined, operational, and mature to identify the applications of this technology toward flourishing and providing the ultimate solution to most of the organization's problems. Therefore, this qualitative research has been designed to identify maturity levels to provide a conceptual model of maturity levels of blockchain technology in grounded theory. First, the initial factors extracted through reviewing the research background; then, by conducting semi-structured interviews with 12 blockchain technology experts, the data were collected. It is noted that the interview was stopped as the duplicated and identical data, based on grounded theory research strategy The meanings and characteristics of the blockchain maturity model challenges presented in three stages of coding. The reliability of the interviews has confirmed by the reliability methods of Test-Retest and intra-subject agreement. The results of data analysis indicate that experts at the emerging level to primary educating and technology monitoring, at the identified level, to recognize the applications of this technology and regulation, at the defined level, to develop a roadmap, proof of concept, and Feasibility, At the operational level, the stakeholder resistance, and at the matured level, the entry new members, the consortium, and increasing attention to maturity requirements, is a spotlight with more frequency than other indicators and elements.

Converting unused offshore oil and gas installations into artificial reefs as one of the alternative methods of decommissioning, is used in many coastal states across the globe for the purposes of coastal management, enhancement and attraction of living marine resources, protection and preservation goals. Despite the positive impacts of artificial reefs, there are also potential negative impacts which require adequate maintenance of assets as well as, continuing monitoring and supervising. Although a lot of countries have comprehensive regulation on artificial reefs, many nations have blanket regulation requiring obsolete structures to be removed, yet it can bring about enormous environmental, socio-economic benefits. The sensitivity of deployment of structures as artificial reefs induced international and regional conventions to intervene and regulate the matter. The aim of this paper is to compare the most important international and regional conventions and critically compare and analysis them with the current Iran’s national laws and regulations. Iran is one of the biggest oil and gas producers and have a huge number of offshore installations which will require decommissioning in the coming years. Therefore, comprehensive national regulation should be enacted on decommissioning and also the possibility of creation artificial reefs. The authors seek out to evaluate the existing legislation in order to assess the potential capacity of Iran’s seas for converting the installations into artificial reefs.

Companies have access to a variety of financial resources to implement available profitable investment projects, to settle overdue debts, to increase working capital, and to pay dividends to shareholders. These resources include cash from operating activities and the sale of assets (as intra-organizational sources of financing), borrowing loans from the bank, issuance of bonds, and issuance of new shares (as outside the organization sources of financing). Financing and its effects on the returns and risk of the company choose sources that minimize financing costs. Then, to prioritize the parameters, the hierarchical method, Topsis, and ANP were used. The results of this study indicated that the factors of efficiency, cost, sustainability, being operational, fairness, and transparency have been the most important criteria for choosing the financing method, as well as forming sub-consortia, receiving facilities, issuing participation bonds, establishing investment companies, presence in the securities market, creating a shareholder plan, and finally attracting foreign capital have been identified as financing methods. Also, the transparency of the financing method in the surveyed companies to identify the appropriate financing method had the least importance.

COVID affects various sectors of the economy, including energy. Measuring these effects on the energy sector can help policymakers adopt appropriate protectionist policies. In this paper, the effect of COVID shock on energy and non-energy sectors has been investigated using the DSGE model. For this purpose, two shocks of preferences and shocks of labor supply have been used. This article adds COVID to the model as well as adding energy to the New Keynesian model. The effect of COVID on the energy and non-energy sectors of the two channels of labor supply and consumer preferences has been investigated. The results of the study indicate that consumption, investment, and production in the energy sector have increased under the influence of both shocks. But consumption, investment and production in non-energy sector have declined. Prices and production costs have increased in both sectors. Also, the negative effects of the preferences shock were greater than the negative effects of the labor supply shock.

The goal of this paper is to study the effect of Covid-19 outbreak on oil markets volatility.Covid-19 as a pandemic has a significant negative effect on global economy.  Alongside the global economy, stock markets responded to the outbreak immediately. The first case appeared in February 20 in Iran.  The outbreak has different implication for Iranian economy. Using daily data on return of oil companies registered at Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE), change in new cases integrated into the E-GARCH model as a proxy for the virus outbreak form February 20, 2020 until December 12, 2020, it applies an E-GARCH model to derive volatilities in index. To test the effect of Covid-19 outbreak on the volatilities in oil companies’ index, change in daily new cases integrated into the E-GARCH model as a proxy for the virus outbreak. The results show that, despite of fresh money pumped into the market and increase in market transactions and volume of trade, during the first phase of outbreak, Covid-19 has negatively affected returns of oil companies’ prices.

The pipeline project, Nord Stream 2 (NS2), has been an issue of controversies. Russia and Germany consider the project an economic contract, but the United-States and Eastern European countries have concerns about its geopolitical effects. These disputes have created a divide in Europe and have posed a threat to trans-Atlantic relations. The current research suggests NS2 can influence the strategic balance between great powers in the international system, giving energy leverage to Russia against United-States, and consequently to China by strengthening projects like the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Our findings put forward that not only NS2, in case of realization, is a source of American decline, but also the debates on the issue are a sign of American struggling for protecting its precarious international position. By placing Europe in front of the United-States, NS2 could be one component of European strategic autonomy (ESA); meanwhile, it may jeopardize ESA by depending on Europe on Russia. Europe’s solution to gain ESA is to use its leverages such as normative one to manage the situation for outcomes like protecting Europe’s unity and economic interests.