CS32: Energy Policy, Security and Geopolitics

The global energy transition is reshaping production structures, trade patterns, and regulatory regimes, particularly across the Indo-Pacific. While Indonesia plays a central role as a fossil fuel producer and critical mineral supplier, limited empirical attention has been given to how domestic governance architecture conditions its strategic autonomy within the evolving energy order. Existing studies largely focus on market instruments or resource endowments, overlooking institutional structure as a determinant of transition performance.
This paper develops a structured analytical framework to evaluate the relationship between governance fragmentation and strategic autonomy in Indonesia's energy transition. Two composite indicators are constructed. First, an Institutional Fragmentation Index (IFI) measures regulatory overlap, inter-agency coordination dispersion, policy stability, and state-owned enterprise concentration. Second, a Strategic Autonomy Index (SAI) captures energy import dependency, supply diversification (Herfindahl-Hirschman concentration measures), domestic value-added capacity, and external trade exposure. The indices are derived from publicly available energy balance, trade, and regulatory datasets and normalized using a bounded scoring methodology.
The results suggest that Indonesia's resource endowment provides substantial leverage potential; however, high institutional dispersion and policy volatility increase coordination costs and weaken transition credibility. Persistent subsidy structures and overlapping mandates reduce investment signaling efficiency and constrain Indonesia's ability to convert resource advantages into sustained strategic positioning within the Indo-Pacific energy system.
By integrating institutional economics with energy security metrics, the study contributes to the energy economics literature on structural determinants of transition outcomes in emerging economies. The findings indicate that governance coherence, rather than resource abundance alone, plays a critical role in shaping long-term strategic autonomy under global decarbonization pressures.

The United States has emerged as the world's dominant natural gas producer, reaching 1,066 bcm in 2024, equivalent to 25% of global production. A defining structural feature is the growing contribution of associated gas, produced as a by-product of oil-directed drilling, which has risen from 25% to 38% of total output since 2014, concentrated in the Permian Basin. This creates a dual-price dependency: Permian gas supply responds predominantly to crude oil prices, while non-associated gas in the Haynesville and Appalachian basins tracks Henry Hub prices. Critically, reduced oil investment paradoxically accelerates Permian Gas-Oil Ratios (GOR), as observed during the 2020 oil price shock when GOR rose by 450 scf/bbl year-on-year, temporarily sustaining volumes while masking long-run supply erosion.
Yet against a backdrop of escalating trade tensions and geopolitical disruptions, the joint oil-price and gas-price elasticities governing these structurally distinct basins have not been simultaneously estimated. Here we present a basin-level panel econometric framework focused on the Permian, Haynesville, and Appalachian basins to jointly identify these elasticities.
Following standard stationarity pre-testing, the estimation proceeds in three steps: Engle–Granger cointegration tests with an Error Correction Model (ECM) to establish long-run price–production relationships by basin; a fixed-effects panel regression estimating separate Brent oil-price and Henry Hub gas-price elasticities, controlled for rig count; and Hansen's (2000) threshold regression, applied individually to each basin, to endogenously identify the price level at which the supply response changes regime.
As the world's largest LNG exporter, the price sensitivity and structural constraints of these three basins directly shape the volume and reliability of US supply available to international buyers. Quantifying basin-specific price thresholds provides a rigorous empirical foundation for energy security planning and LNG import diversification strategies in gas-importing economies, including Chile.

Energy is one of the dimensions of economic rivalry between the United States and China. This energy rivalry, driven by their distinct capabilities and resource preconditions, is characterized by contrasting strategies. While the U.S. is leveraging its oil and gas reserves to enhance energy security and geopolitical leadership, China is advancing as an electrification superpower through nuclear and renewable energy technologies to mitigate dependency on energy imports and expand global influence. Such divergent pathways shape their geopolitical and economic stance, also significantly affecting global economy and international relations. Consequently, this rivalry has apparent implications on energy policy choices and energy diplomacy maneuver of other actors. Therefore it merits an in-depth analysis. Given times of turbulent geopolitics and weaponized interdependence, enhanced understanding of this competition may be of high value added for various decision and policy-makers.
While the U.S. versus China energy rivalry is widely discussed, understanding of what drives individual countries to align with either the U.S. hydrocarbon-oriented bloc or China's electrification-oriented bloc appears under-researched. Hence, the objective of the study is to explore how countries are preconditioned by various aspects in the context of alignment to superpowers' energy spheres. The study focuses on aspects such as energy resource endowments, energy structure and intensity of economies, countries' types and development stages, economic policy priorities, and political regimes as well as strategic alliances and interdependencies. Methodologically, the study combines energy and institutional economics with political economy approaches. Alongside insights from these methods on what pathways various types of countries can reasonably follow in realism-driven global economic interdependences, it is based on cluster analysis covering economies across all continents. This research with its findings from clustering aims to enhance existing body of knowledge on mechanisms behind global energy developments and related economic landscape shifts.

This study analyzes Chinese policies related to both energy affairs and international interactions with multiple Latin American countries to reveal the strategies and highlights. 30 policy documents officially announced by the central government of the People's Republic of China between 2006 and 2024 are collected. The whole dataset is divided into 5 groups by collaborator country, and text mining is conducted based on the text of each group. The high-frequency words, their co-occurrence with the collaborator country name and the word clusters reveal the major policy strategies and the policy highlights. The analysis results reveal that the policies highlight the strategy of conducting international collaborations between China and Latin American countries through economic activities, including investment from China, industrial development and infrastructure construction conducted by Chinese companies in Latin American countries. The analysis results also highlight that to conduct international economic activities, the Chinese central government attaches importance to understanding the local laws and regulations in Latin American countries. This study reveals the major strategies applied for international interactions, the importance attached to economic collaborations, and provides a reference for further looking into international interactions, bettering policies, and realizing mutual trust in the global energy sector.