Geology Reports⌕ Search

Geology topics

Steven T. Anderson

Publications and source records attributed to Steven T. Anderson.

25 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
USGS2016

Risk, liability, and economic issues with long-term CO 2 storage—A review

Given a scarcity of commercial-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects, there is a great deal of uncertainty in the risks, liability, and their cost implications for geologic storage of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ). The probabilities of leakage and the risk of induced seismicity could be remote, but the volume of geologic CO 2 storage (GCS) projected to be necessary to have a significant impact on increasing CO 2 concentrations in the atmosphere is far greater than the volumes of CO 2 injected thus far. National-level estimates of the technically accessible CO 2 storage resource (TASR) onshore in the United States are on the order of thousands of gigatons of CO 2 storage capacity, but such estimates generally assume away any pressure management issues. Pressure buildup in the storage reservoir is expected to be a primary source of risk associated with CO 2 storage, and only a fraction of the theoretical TASR could be available unless the storage operator extracts the saltwater brines or other formation fluids that are already present in the geologic pore space targeted for CO 2 storage. Institutions, legislation, and processes to manage the risk, liability, and economic issues with CO 2 storage in the United States are beginning to emerge, but will need to progress further in order to allow a commercial-scale CO 2 storage industry to develop in the country. The combination of economic tradeoffs, property rights definitions, liability issues, and risk considerations suggests that CO 2 storage offshore of the United States may be more feasible than onshore, especially during the current (early) stages of industry development.

Natural Resources Research↗
USGS2016

Uncertainty in CO2 storage cost and resource estimates

Carbon capture from stationary sources and geological storage of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) is an important option to include in strategies for the mitigation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, the potential costs of commercial-scale CO 2 storage are not well constrained, stemming from the inherent uncertainty in current geologic storage resource estimates coupled with a lack of detailed estimates of the infrastructure needed to access those resources. The storage resource estimates are highly dependent on storage efficiency values, which are calculated based on ranges of geological and physical parameters. If dynamic factors (such as variability of storage efficiency and injection rates), reservoir pressure limitations, CO 2 migration boundaries, consideration of closed or semi-closed saline reservoir systems, and other possible constraints on recent estimates of the technically accessible CO 2 storage resource (TASR) in the United States are accounted for, it is possible that only a fraction of the estimated TASR could actually be available without incurring significant additional costs. Although high-level assessments of the TASR typically assume that any issues with reservoir pressure buildup as a result of CO 2 injection will be mitigated by reservoir pressure management, most estimates of the costs of CO 2 storage do not include the costs of pressure management. Production of brines could be essential to increasing the dynamic storage capacity of reservoirs that will be targeted for CO 2 storage to approach volumetric storage capacity levels (IEAGHG, 2014), but including the costs of this critical method of reservoir pressure management could increase current estimates of the costs of CO 2 storage (e.g., Dahowski and others, 2011; NETL, 2014) by two times, or more (Harto and Veil, 2011). To the extent that uncertainty in the availability and cost of CO 2 storage contributes to uncertainty in the costs of the entire process of carbon capture and storage, it could be a factor in delaying investment into upstream carbon-capture projects (Laughton and others, 2008). It may be useful to have basin-wide (or greater) estimates of geologic storage capacity broken down into economic feasibility classes according to the total costs of CO 2 storage, including the expected costs of pressure management.

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Progr↗
USGS2010

Preemption games: theory and experiment

El Mutún, perhaps the world's largest remaining iron ore deposit, was opened to private investors in the 1980s but, due to the high cost of developing the remote Bolivian site, there were no takers for two decades. In late 2005, spurred by rising commodity prices, the Brazilian company EBX finally seized the opportunity, preempting rivals based in China and India. Numerous similar examples can be found in the annals of mining and oil companies (Raymond F. Mikesell et al. 1971).

American Economic Review↗
USGS2009

Learning to wait: A laboratory investigation

Human subjects decide when to sink a fixed cost C to seize an irreversible investment opportunity whose value V is governed by Brownian motion. The optimal policy is to invest when V first crosses a threshold V* = (1 + w*) C, where the wait option premium w* depends on drift, volatility, and expiration hazard parameters. Subjects in the Low w* treatment on average invest at values quite close to optimum. Subjects in the two Medium and the High w* treatments invested at values below optimum, but with the predicted ordering, and values approached the optimum by the last block of 20 periods.

Review of Economic Studies↗
USGS2008

Buy it now: A hybrid internet market institution

This paper analyzes seller choices and outcomes in approximately 700 Internet auctions of a relatively homogeneous good. The ‘Buy it Now’ option allows the seller to convert the auction into a posted price market. We use a structural model to control for the conduct of the auction as well as product and seller characteristics. In explaining seller choices, we find that the ‘Buy it Now’ option was used more often by sellers with higher ratings and offering fewer units; and posted prices were more prevalent for used items. In explaining auction outcomes, we find that auctions with a ‘Buy it Now’ price had higher winning bids, ceteris paribus, whether or not the auction ended with the ‘Buy it Now’ offer being accepted, possibly reflecting signaling or bounded rationality. We also find that posting prices, by combining ‘Buy it Now’ and an equal starting price, was an effective strategy for sellers in the sample.

Journal of Electronic Commerce Research↗
USGS2007

Seller strategies on eBay: Does size matter?

We examine seller tactics in 1177 eBay auctions. The largest volume sellers make rather homogeneous choices; smaller sellers are more heterogeneous. Some tactics, such as starting the auction with a ‘Buy it Now’ offer, appear to increase revenue. Perhaps due to intense competition, however, the overall impact of most tactics appears to be quite small. The main exception is the use of a secret reserve price, which raises the winning bid conditional on a sale, but reduces the probability of a sale. This can be advantageous, depending on the seller’s risk aversion and impatience.

International Journal of Electronic Business↗