Exploring the Spatiotemporal Production of Conventional Oil: The ACEGES Laboratory for Energy Policy-Making

Abstract

For effective energy policy-making, we propose an agent-based computational laboratory, termed ACEGES (Agent-based Computational Economics of the Global Energy System), for probabilistic forecasts of future oil productions. In particular, we show how agent-based modelling and simulation can be applied to understand better the challenging outlook for oil production by means of controlled computational experiments while accounting for uncertainties in resource estimates, demand growth, production growth and peak/decline point. Our approach emphasises the idea that the oil system is better modelled not as black-box abode of 'the invisible hand' but as a complex system whose macroscopic regularities emerges from the interactions of its constituent components. The 'decoding' of constituent components is the goal of this study. Our simulations show that global production of conventional oil will happen somewhere between 2020 and 2030. Using the proposed petroleum market diversity, we also observe a reduced supply diversity around the peak year.

Keywords: oil forecasting, scenario generation, petroleum market diversity, ACEGES