In recent years, CO2 emissions have become the leading basis of assessment for car taxes in most European countries. In July 2009, with a view to pursuing climate policy goals, also Germany began using this factor to assess taxation on cars. The DIW Berlin has carried out a systematic and quantitative comparison of car taxation in Europe.1 The results reveal high tax rates in over ten countries that ...
In late 2005, the German energy companies E.ON and Wintershall and Russian Gazprom reached an agreement to build a new huge pipeline Nord Stream through the Baltic Sea. This pipeline will provide Russia for the first time ever with the direct access to its Western European customers. This pipeline will contribute to the security of the Western Europe's energy supply through creating an alternative ...
Since the late 1990s, natural gas has been the second most important source of energy in the European Union after oil. Current forecasts predict that the demand for natural gas will continue to rise over the long term. As the production of natural gas in the EU has already passed its peak and will drop in coming years, natural gas imports will have to rise considerably. To ensure according supplies ...
The objective of our paper is to analyze the prospects for LNG development in the US. In particular, we discuss LNG investment projects with respect to natural gas supply and demand, existing transmission infrastructure, and competing pipeline projects. At the same time potential competition between natural gas and coal in power generation is taken into account. We conclude that in the mid-term, LNG ...
This paper presents a model of the European natural gas supply, GASMOD, which is structured as a two-stage-game of successive natural gas exports to Europe (upstream market) and wholesale trade within Europe (downstream market) and which explicitly includes infrastructure capacities. We compare three possible market scenarios: Cournot competition in both markets, perfect competition in both markets, ...
In this paper, we discuss the relationship between infrastructure regulation and investment in light of the emerging "security of supply" debate. We approach the subjectby surveying the literature of the past two decades, especially examining the interactions among restructuring, regulation, and investment. The empirical section of this paper relies on case studies of the relationship between the regulatory ...
Russian energy production has increased substantially in recent years, with production of natural gas now actually exceeding the levels reached in the early 1990s. The growth in energy production has gone hand in hand with a rise in Russian energy exports. The European Union is an extremely important sales area for Russia. Vice versa, energy deliveries from Russia account for a very sizable share of ...