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- Rioux, Bertrand
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About
Bertrand is a research fellow focusing on the impact of market regulation and liberalization in energy markets. An experienced energy systems model developer (linear optimization and mixed complementary problems), he is working on developing the KAPSARC Energy Model (KEM) as a decision support tool for analyzing price regulation in energy economies. Bertrand has contributed to the development of KEM Saudi Arabia and is the lead developer of KEM China, studying the impact of government regulation in the coal, power and natural gas markets. He was previously employed as a research assistant at the Canadian Space Agency.
Publications
08 May 2022
Moving Saudi Arabia’s Role in the Global Methane Pledge ForwardIn our previous Instant Insight, The Global Methane Pledge: What It Means for the Oil and Gas Industry Post-COP26, we shed light on the increased momentum behind the issue of methane emissions and how it is taking center stage in major climate change forums. As of the time of writing...
22 March 2022
Potential implications of the EU Carbon Border Adjustment MechanismFrom 2023 onward, the European Union’s (EU’s) Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) will require importers to declare the embedded carbon emissions of electricity, iron, steel, aluminum, cement and fertilizers. The CBAM will ultimately transition into a carbon import tax, with th...
28 February 2022
Integrated Oil Companies and the Requiem for a Transition: How Are They Coping with Climate Change?Integrated oil and gas (O&G) companies operate vertically integrated businesses that span the O&G value chain. In this way, they can leverage expertise across multiple domains rather than just focusing on exploration and production (E&P). Examples of such companies includ...
12 October 2020
Can Cooperation Enhance Natural Gas Utilization in the GCC?The last decade saw dramatic changes in the energy sector, including the shale oil and gas boom in the United States (U.S.), a commodity down-cycle, and heightened awareness of the global climate challenge. In response, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member countrie...
16 July 2020
Simulating a Global Oil Market With No Residual Supplier
What if OPEC decided to abandon organizing residual production collectively, transitioning the world permanently to a competitive oil market? This commentary is based on a forthcoming KAPSARC paper, “Cooperate or Compete? Insights from Simulating a Global Oil Market with No Residual ...
01 January 2019
The Economic Impact of Price Controls on China’s Natural Gas Supply ChainDespite significant progress made by China in liberalizing its natural gas market, certain key areas such as market access and pricing mechanisms remain controlled by the government.
01 June 2018
Unintended consequences of China’s coal capacity cut policyIn early 2016, China introduced additional capacity cut policies to rebalance supply in the coal market to match demand that had been reduced by slow economic growth and strict environmental regulation. Ensuing disruptions to the coal market caused these policies to be revised and, s...
01 June 2017
How do Price Caps in China’s Electricity Sector Impact the Economics of Coal, Power and Wind? Potential Gains from ReformsChina imposes maximum prices by plant type and region on the electricity that generators sell to utilities. We show that these price caps create a need for subsidies and cross-subsidies, and affect the economics of wind power. We model the price caps using a mixed complementarity for...
01 April 2017
Efficient industrial energy use: The first step in transitioning Saudi Arabia’s energy mixIn Saudi Arabia, industrial fuel prices are administered below international prices and firms make decisions based on low energy prices, increasing domestic energy demand. This analysis explores alternative policies designed to induce a transition to a more efficient energy system by...
01 November 2016
Economic impacts of debottlenecking congestion in the Chinese coal supply chainThe fast pace of development in China’s coal industry created bottlenecks in its transportation infrastructure. These bottlenecks likely affected not only China’s domestic coal market, but also global coal markets. In this paper, we estimate the costs and consequences of ...
01 May 2015
Lowering Saudi Arabia’s fuel consumption and energy system costs without increasing end consumer pricesUsing a multi-sector equilibrium model of the Saudi energy system that handles administered prices in a mixed-complementarity formulation, we present results from a set of policy scenarios that lower oil consumption in the country. Some of these scenarios are the solutions to Mathema...
23 March 2021
Economic Analysis of Gas Pipeline Trade Cooperation: A GCC case studyNatural gas development across the member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) — including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain —has become a priority for achieving long-term energy security and for supporting economic diversification ...
06 August 2020
Cooperate or Compete? Insights from Simulating a Global Oil Market with No Residual SupplierStructural changes in the global oil sector are disrupting conventional market dynamics and the roles played by competing and cooperating producers. Industry players are adjusting to the shale (or ‘tight’) oil revolution and the possibility of plateauing or peaking global oil demand....
28 May 2019
An Economic Analysis of China’s Domestic Crude Oil Supply Policies
- The level of uneconomic oil production in China is highly sensitive to the international oil price. At $50/bbl about 9 million tonnes of domestic supplies ar...
- Rising crude oil import prices since mid-2017 may allow policymakers to further deregulate China’s domestic oil sector.
24 May 2018
The Economic Impact of Price Controls on China’s Natural Gas Supply ChainDespite significant progress made by China in liberalizing its natural gas market, certain key areas such as market access and pricing mechanisms remain heavily monopolized or controlled by the government. To assess how such distortions impact the market, we developed a Mixed Complem...
20 December 2017
Restructuring Saudi Arabia’s Power Generation Sector: Model-Based InsightsSaudi Arabia plans to reform and privatize its power generation sector as part of the Kingdom’s Vision 2030. To provide analytical insights, we developed a model that simulates the restructuring of the electricity market, along with reforming fuel prices to an energy equivalent of $3...
29 September 2016
Potential Gains From Reforming Price Caps in China’s Power SectorWhen energy sectors transition from government-controlled to market-driven systems, the legacy regulatory instruments can create unintended market distortions and lead to higher costs. In China, the most notable regulatory throwback is ceilings on electricity prices that generators c...
07 September 2015
Economic Impacts of Debottlenecking Congestion in the Chinese Coal Supply ChainChina’s coal industry grew at unprecedented rates during the first decade of the 2000s in order to support equally unprecedented economic growth. In that type of environment, it is impossible for the capacities of every link in the supply chain to be correctly sized all the time. In ...
06 August 2015
A Framework for Comparing the Viability of Different Desalination ApproachesMost renewable powered desalination schemes are hybrids that displace fossil fuel power when renewable power is available. Their economic viability depends only on whether the renewable power source can generate electricity more cheaply than the fuels that it displaces. The framework...
07 June 2015
Efficient Industrial Energy Use: The First Step in Transitioning Saudi Arabia’s Energy MixExternal observers worry about whether Saudi domestic consumption of oil will crowd out exports. This is based on simple extrapolations which suggest that in a little more than 20 years Saudi Arabia may become a net importer of hydrocarbon fuels. However, our research does not suppor...
07 March 2014
Lowering Saudi Arabia’s fuel consumption and energy system costs without increasing end consumer pricesSaudi Arabia aims to reduce the growth of its energy demand. This paper outlines an approach that could help the country to reduce substantively its current fuel consumption and could result in a net economic gain without increasing current end consumer prices and while maintaining p...
01 December 2020
Assessing the Impact of Stablecoins on the International Monetary System: G20 and IMF to Study the Impact of Facebook’s Libra Project
12 March 2020
Implementing Alternative Pricing Policies in Economic Equilibrium Models Using the Extended Mathematical Programming FrameworkStandard economic optimization models represent markets in perfect competition. They are commonly used, though they may not accurately represent real-world policies and regulations. Equilibrium models built using a mixed complementarity problem (MCP) approach are capable of simulatin...