Oil Market (oil + market)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Fuzzy Legality and National Styles of Regulation: Government Intervention in the Israel Downstream Oil Market

LAW & POLICY, Issue 1 2002
Margit Cohn
This article examines the role of statute law in regulation and government intervention through a detailed historical case study of a crucial retail market. The history of state intervention in the Israeli oil supply market is dominated by "fuzzy legality," a concept expounded in a former article. Legal fuzziness allowed the industry, acting in concert with the government regulator, to retain a lucrative, practically non,accountable arrangement in changing politico,economic climates. Three central forces encouraged continuing fuzziness: a "cloud" of state security, institutional stickiness that preserved colonial mandatory legal structures, and a prevalent national culture of nonlegalism. The article ends with a careful suggestion regarding the Israeli national style of regulation. Compared to American "adversarial legalism," and its opposite, "consensual nonlegalism" the Israeli style may be termed "adversarial nonlegalism," and holds less promise for balancing market and public interests. [source]


SIMULATION OF THIN-FILM DEODORIZERS IN PALM OIL REFINING

JOURNAL OF FOOD PROCESS ENGINEERING, Issue 2010
ROBERTA CERIANI
ABSTRACT As the need for healthier fats and oils (natural vitamin and trans fat contents) and interest in biofuels are growing, many changes in the world's vegetable oil market are driving the oil industry to developing new technologies and recycling traditional ones. Computational simulation is widely used in the chemical and petrochemical industries as a tool for optimization and design of (new) processes, but that is not the case for the edible oil industry. Thin-film deodorizers are novel equipment developed for steam deacidification of vegetable oils, and no work on the simulation of this type of equipment could be found in the open literature. This paper tries to fill this gap by presenting results from the study of the effect of processing variables, such as temperature, pressure and percentage of stripping steam, in the final quality of product (deacidified palm oil) in terms of final oil acidity, the tocopherol content and neutral oil loss. The simulation results have been evaluated by using the response surface methodology. The model generated by the statistical analysis for tocopherol retention has been validated by matching its results with industrial data published in the open literature. PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS This work is a continuation of our previous works (Ceriani and Meirelles 2004a, 2006; Ceriani et al. 2008), dealing with the simulation of continuous deodorization and/or steam deacidification for a variety of vegetable oils using stage-wised columns, and analyzing both the countercurrent and the cross-flow patterns. In this work, we have studied thin-film deodorizers, which are novel equipment developed for steam deacidification of vegetable oils. Here, we highlight issues related to final oil product quality and the corresponding process variables. [source]


Extraction of Poppy Seed Oil Using Supercritical CO2

JOURNAL OF FOOD SCIENCE, Issue 2 2003
B. Bozan
ABSTRACT: Extraction of poppy seed oil with supercritical carbon dioxide (SC-CO2) was performed and the effect of extraction conditions on oil solubility and yield as well as oil composition was evaluated. Within the temperature (50 to 70 °C) and pressure (21 to 55 MPa) ranges studied, 55 MPa/70 °C gave the highest oil solubility (24.1 mg oil/g CO2) and oil yield (38.7 g oil/100g seed). Fatty acid composition of the oil obtained with SC-CO2 at 55 MPa/70 °C was similar to that of petroleum ether-extracted oil (p > 0.05) with linoleic acid making up 69.0 to 73.7% of fatty acids. Tocol content of the SC-CO2 -extracted oils varied from 22.37 to 33.35 mg/100 g oil, which was higher than that of petroleum ether-extracted oil (15.28 mg/100 g oil). Poppy seed oil may have potential in the rapidly growing specialty oil market. [source]


Recent trends in the total characterization of new-generation base fluids

LUBRICATION SCIENCE, Issue 2 2001
I. D. Singh
Abstract The quality of lubricating base oils used worldwide is changing rapidly as a result of stringent environmental regulation and the pressing need for oils to perform well under severe operating conditions. For example, although the base oil market in India now depends entirely on conventional group I base oils, group II and III base oils will soon be mandatory in lubrication formulation. These oils are generally more stable towards oxidation due to the virtual absence of heteroatom-containing compounds and to their low aromatic content. The analytical procedures developed over the years for the characterization of new and used group I mineral base oils will not be successful for all the requirements of these new oils. Thus, a systematic study is required to test the universal validity of characterisation methodology for these new-generation base fluids. This paper focuses on the use of various analytical techniques for base oil characterization and the methodology required for the total characterization of new-generation base oils. [source]


On the influence of oil prices on economic activity and other macroeconomic and financial variables,

OPEC ENERGY REVIEW, Issue 4 2008
François Lescaroux
The aim of this paper is to investigate the links between oil prices and various macroeconomic and financial variables for a large set of countries, including both oil-importing and oil-exporting countries. Both short-run and long-run interactions are analysed through the implementation of Granger-causality tests, evaluation of cross correlations between the cyclical components of the series in order to identify lead/lag relationships and cointegration analysis. Our results highlight the existence of various relationships between oil prices and macroeconomic variables and, especially, an important link between oil and share prices on the short run. Turning to the long run, numerous long-term relationships are detected, the Granger-causality generally running from oil prices to the other variables. An important conclusion is relating to the key role played by the oil market on stock markets. [source]


Forecasting volatility for options valuation

OPEC ENERGY REVIEW, Issue 3 2006
Mahdjouba Belaifa
The petroleum sector plays a neuralgic role in the basement of world economies, and market actors (producers, intermediates, as well as consumers) are continuously subjected to the dynamics of unstable oil market. Huge amounts are being invested along the production chain to make one barrel of crude oil available to the end user. Adding to that are the effect of geopolitical dynamics as well as geological risks as expressed in terms of low chances of successful discoveries. In addition, fiscal regimes and regulations, technology and environmental concerns are also among some of the major factors that contribute to the substantial risk in the oil industry and render the market structure vulnerable to crises. The management of these vulnerabilities require modern tools to reduce risk to a certain level, which unfortunately is a non-zero value. The aim of this paper is, therefore, to provide a modern technique to capture the oil price stochastic volatility that can be implemented to value the exposure of an investor, a company, a corporate or a Government. The paper first analyses the regional dependence on oil prices, through a historical perspective and then looks at the evolution of pricing environment since the large price jumps of the 1970s. The main causes of oil prices volatility are treated in the third part of the paper. The rest of the article deals with volatility models and forecasts used in risk management, with an implication for pricing derivatives. [source]


The economics of oil definitions: the case of Canada's oil sands

OPEC ENERGY REVIEW, Issue 1 2005
Douglas B. Reynolds
Canada has chosen to define its 174 billion barrels of oil sand bitumen reserves as crude oil deposits, putting the country on a par with Saudi Arabia in potential oil production. However, the physical and economic definition of calling oil sand bitumen crude oil needs to be questioned. On the face of it, these definitions make Canada look as powerful as OPEC's leading producer, or Russia, on the world oil market. However, a fuller analysis shows that Canadian oil sand is quite different from crude oil and that Canada will have little if any effect on the global oil market, or on OPEC. [source]


The impact of downstream refinery concerns on the international oil market

OPEC ENERGY REVIEW, Issue 4 2004
OPEC Secretariat
This article looks at the difficulties experienced by the international oil market in 2004, in the context of the heavy pressure that has been put on stability and prices by downstream refinery problems, even though the market has remained well-supplied with crude. It notes the efforts OPEC has made to maintain a reasonable market balance, in particular by accelerating the implementation of production expansion plans to increase the excess supply cushion. But it seems that, along with a tight market for light sweet crude oil, problems in the downstream sector will remain major upside risks for the market in 2005, risks that require urgent attention. [source]


Oil and macroeconomic fluctuations in Mexico

OPEC ENERGY REVIEW, Issue 4 2002
François Boye
This paper tests the conventional contention that, due to the major policy changes in Mexico that stem from the 1980s, fluctuations in the international oil market have had no significant impact on movements in the Mexican economy in the last two decades. It does this by using univariate statistical techniques in its first part and resorting to an econometric structural break test and impulse response analysis respectively in its last two parts. Its findings bear out conventional wisdom: Mexico cannot be likened to an OPEC Country in any respect, including the point of view that its public finance is totally impervious to fluctuations in its oil revenue. [source]


Oil and macroeconomic fluctuations in Ecuador

OPEC ENERGY REVIEW, Issue 2 2001
François Boye
This paper sets out to test the conventional contention that the Ecuadorian economy has been totally dependent on fluctuations in the international oil market since the 1970s. It does this through the use of univariate statistical techniques in the first part, while it resorts to the econometric structural break test and impulse response analysis respectively in the final two parts. Its findings take issue with intuition and conventional wisdom, in that: first, they do not establish the international oil market as the prime mover of the economy; secondly, they provide no evidence that the real and trade sectors evolve necessarily in accordance with fluctuations in the oil sector; and thirdly, they call for a multicausal view of economic fluctuations in Ecuador. [source]


Impact of higher oil prices on the Chinese economy

OPEC ENERGY REVIEW, Issue 3 2007
Sana Zaouali
The demand for oil in China has dramatically increased in the last years. Today, China is the second largest consumer of oil in the world behind the United States. This growing demand in oil comes in a context of steep international price hikes for oil. With its increasing oil consumption, China today plays a major role on the international oil markets, and a change in its consumption could seriously destabilise these markets. Moreover, today China occupies a preponderant place on the international scene, and a large drop in its economic activity could significantly affect world growth. It, therefore, is important for us to ask what the impact of the current increase in oil prices on the Chinese economy might be. The aim of this article is to conduct a quantitative analysis on the potential impact of the rise in oil prices on the Chinese economy. The macroeconomic and sectoral effects are evaluated with the help of a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. Two scenarios were formulated: the first assuming a US $10 increase in international oil prices; the second, a $25 increase. [source]


Out-of-sample Hedge Performances for Risk Management in China Commodity Futures Markets,

ASIAN ECONOMIC JOURNAL, Issue 3 2009
Sang-Kuck Chung
C13; C32; G13 We consider a new time-series model that describes long memory and asymmetries simultaneously under the dynamic conditional correlation specification, and that can be used to assess an extensive evaluation of out-of-sample hedging performances using aluminum and fuel oil futures markets traded on the Shanghai Futures Exchange. Upon fitting it to the spot and futures returns of aluminum and fuel oil markets, it is found that a parsimonious version of the model captures the salient features of the data rather well. The empirical results suggest that separating the effects of positive and negative basis on the market volatility, and the correlation between two markets as well as jointly incorporating the long memory effect of the basis on market returns not only provides better descriptions of the dynamic behaviors of commodity prices, but also plays a statistically significant role in determining dynamic hedging strategies. [source]