Policy and Regulation in the Face of Uncertainty: The Case of Disruptive Markets for Unconventional Natural Gas in North America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Energy markets are inherently capital intensive, and operate under the constraints of a wide range of uncertainty and risk, from project and construction, to regulatory approvals and on to market supply and demand characteristics. They reflect deliberate, long term system scale, engineering design and anticipated rates of financial return. As a consequence, the role of policy and regulatory review and approvals plays a significant role in risk profiles. Since 1990, the substitution of gas-fired combustion for other thermal energy resources has met several key objectives including lower capital cost, lower net air emissions profiles and faster ramp rates. Reports of declining reserves of Natural Gas in North America caused this model to be re-examined recently. However, recent technology advances have made the extraction of natural gas from so-called unconventional sources cost effective, and extended estimates of affordable supplies several decades in the future. The impact of trend may disrupt reliance on coal and nuclear for base-load electricity resources, displace some hydroelectric facilities used for load firming, and even defer the need for some alternatives such as renewable. Recent evidence of potential seismic and water quality hazards from hydraulic stimulation of geothermal and tight gas resources suggest that the existing regulatory approval model may be unprepared to deal with the uncertainty and risk associated with these activities. Regulators may decide to either defer decisions to the future, impose uneconomic mitigation measures designed to reduce risk to nearly zero, or simply deny projects on the basis of incomplete or difficult technical presentations or solutions. Since energy development and consequent risk assessment is highly probabilistic in nature, the deterministic process of regulatory hearings includes an inherent bias against new or innovative, typically unproven technologies and processes. This paper explores the issues that must be addressed within the structure of the regulatory process in order to fairly evaluate the potential of new unconventional gas and alternative technologies in meeting future supply needs in the electricity system.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".