A significant share of the world’s undiscovered oil and natural gas resources are assumed to lie under the seabed of the Arctic Ocean. Up until now, the exploitation of the resources especially under the European Arctic has largely been prevented by the challenges posed by sea ice coverage, harsh weather conditions, darkness, remoteness of the fields, and lack of infrastructure. Gradual warming has, however, improved the accessibility of the Arctic Ocean. We show for the most resource-abundant European Arctic Seas whether and how a climate induced reduction in sea ice might impact future accessibility of offshore natural gas and crude oil resources. Based on this analysis we show for a number of illustrative but representative locations which technology options exist based on a cost-minimization assessment. We find that under current hydrocarbon prices, oil and gas from the European offshore Arctic is not competitive on world markets.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13280-017-0957-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
We estimate the causal impact of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme on manufacturing firms using comprehensive panel data from the German production census. Semiparametric matching estimators yield robust evidence that the policy caused treated firms to abate one-fifth of their CO 2 emissions between 2007 and 2010 relative to non-treated firms. This reduction was achieved predominantly by improving energy efficiency and by curbing the consumption of natural gas and petroleum products, but not electricity use. We find no evidence that emissions trading lowered employment, gross output or exports of treated firms. * We owe a debt of gratitude to Katrin Rehdanz for countless discussions and her generous support at all stages of this project. We thank the research data centre (FDZ) for granting us access to the AFiD data. We thank FDZ staff members Diane Zabel, Michael Rößner and, especially, Alexander Vogel of the Statistical Offices of the Länder in Bremen, Halle and Kiel, respectively, for expert advice regarding various AFiD modules and for technical help with the data matching and estimation. Staff at the Federal Statistical Office graciously provided information on various statistical products. We thank, without implicating,
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