WORLD ENERGY MARKETS FACING CHANGE, ESTABLISH ECONOMIC LINKS
While energy markets around the world are more open now to trade, competition, and foreign investment than at any time in history, questions regarding market liberalization, transparency, and security of supply are pulling markets in the other direction. Competing forces seem to pit producers against consumers, development against sustainability, competition against regulation, and national issues against transparency. The solution, said CERA President Joseph A. Stanislaw in an analysis published in Economic Perspectives: An Electronic Journal of the US Department of State, is to establish the economic linkages that connect producing countries to consumers, nationalistic economies to free markets, and energy needs to environmental considerations, and in doing so, increasing cooperation and creating a more stable, sustainable international environment. Signs of such cooperation are already changing the energy landscape:
- the 2,350 kilometer Kazakhstan-to-China oil pipeline
- the liberalization of the European natural gas market
- the 655-mile oil pipeline built in sub-Saharan Africa by ExxonMobil, Malaysian state firm Petronas, and ChevronTexaco that links supplies in Chad with world markets via an Atlantic port in Cameroon
