Le pétrole, un exemple de prix volatile et imprévisible aux conséquences majeures - Gaël Giraud

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Les transitions énergétique-écologiques dans les pays du Sud

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École normale supérieure

Les transitions énergétique-écologiques dans les pays du Sud

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Ce MOOC co-produit par l'Agence Française de Développement et l'ENS se situe à la confluence du développement des pays du Sud et le développement durable. Il a : - une dimension macroéconomique et financière portée notamment par Gael Giraud et Alain Grandjean en tant qu’intervenants, - une dimension écologique et climatique portée notamment par David Claessen et les intervenants de l’ENS, et - une dimension de focus sur les pays du Sud portée notamment par les intervenants de l’AFD. Voici les objectifs d'apprentissage de l'ensemble de la formation Obj 1 : Être en mesure de faire le lien entre la transition énergétique, la transition écologique, le rôle de l’énergie dans l’économie, le modèle de développement économique et les questions de financement Obj 2 : Savoir plaider et argumenter, sur les enjeux, la nécessité de changer la réalité pour mettre en place des stratégies et des plans d’actions Obj 3 : Savoir faire le lien entre la Transition énergétique et les solutions de financement, savoir faire le lien entre compréhension et actions Jusqu’à présent, le développement des pays du Nord reposait sur une exploitation croissante des ressources énergétiques ainsi qu’une liberté accrue de commerce et d’échanges à l’échelle de la planète ; or, nous savons désormais qu’un tel modèle n’est plus soutenable, en raison du réchauffement climatique et de la surexploitation des ressources conduisant à des désastres sanitaires, sociaux et environnementaux. Dès lors, comment assurer une croissance juste et équitable pour tous ? Quel rôle les pays des Suds ont-ils à jouer dans ce bouleversement complet des modèles économiques, commerciaux et politiques actuels, pour mener une transition énergétique et écologique efficace ? Ce cours en ligne gratuit propose le point de vue croisé de plusieurs spécialistes des problématiques liées au changement climatique et au développement des Suds. Sous un angle résolument pratique, ils livreront leur lecture des crises actuelles et les réponses pouvant y être apportées. Programme : Semaine 1 : Notre mode de développement est insoutenable écologiquement Semaine 2 : Les modèles économiques dominants font obstacle à la transition énergétique et écologique Semaine 3 : La trajectoire de la transition énergétique : décarboner le PIB Semaine 4 : Le modèle d'une transition écologique vers une nouvelle prospérité Semaine 5 : La gouvernance de la transition énergétique et écologique Semaine 6 : Le financement de la transition énergétique et écologique

À partir de la leçon

Les modèles économiques dominants font obstacle à la transition énergétique et écologique

S’affranchir du fondamentalisme de marché passe d’abord par l’acceptation de nouveaux indicateurs complétant le PIB. Ces derniers s’élèvent au-delà du simple aspect monétaire du bien-être et tiennent compte, non seulement, des externalités positives générées par les secteurs sociaux, mais aussi, des externalités négatives environnementales associées aux activités humaines. Ainsi, nous cesserons de mesurer une croissance fictive et pourront piloter des politiques publiques durables. Parallèlement, le succès de ces politiques repose sur la capacité des acteurs à asseoir leur stratégie sur le long terme. Or, sans une régulation plus stricte de la sphère financière, les pays du Sud ne disposeront pas des capacités budgétaires nécessaires au financement des grands projets de la transition.

Le pétrole, un exemple de prix volatile et imprévisible aux conséquences majeures - Gaël Giraud12:25

Rencontrer les enseignants

Gael Giraud
Economiste en chef à l'Agence Française de Développement
Economie
David Claessen
Maitre de conférences à l'ENS
Ecologie-évolutive et environnement-société
Alain Grandjean
Docteur en économie de l'environnement, co-fondateur de Carbone 4
Economie de l'environnement

Hello!

This session is about oil,

an example of a raw material whose price volatility

has major consequences for countries in the South.

First, we’re going to see

how oil is a very financialised raw material.

The economic information media

often refers to the price per barrel of oil.

A barrel is 159 litres, the size of the containers

used to transport oil in the 19th century.

Today oil is no longer transported in barrels

but in gigantic pipelines

that go from where it’s extracted to where it’s refined.

Refined oil is then sent out by pipeline,

by truck, by ship, or by tank car

to points of consumption, factories, gas stations, etc.

The price of oil,

which is so important for recent industrial development,

has never really been set by the market,

in that oil prices have never been set

by adjustment between supply and demand.

To simplify, we could say that until the 1950s,

the big American producers, organised in a quasi-cartel,

fixed prices by way of a partly illegal understanding.

Since 1950

the output of the American wells discovered in the 1930s

began to decline,

because the easy-to-extract oil had already been consumed.

U.S. domestic production was no longer enough for consumption.

Then immense new resources were discovered in the Middle East,

and in 1960,

Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela

founded OPEC, the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.

OPEC used calculation formulas of set or predicable prices

for oil until the 2000s.

Around the turn of the century,

it stopped influencing prices directly

while maintaining a decisive influence on the amounts extracted.

Financial markets had many more opportunities

to offer corporations insurance products

and products to cover the risk of changes in oil prices,

as was the case in the 1970s with exchange rates,

after the end of the Bretton Woods system.

This is called the financialization of the oil market.

Here are some examples of these financial products.

Let’s start with a delivery of oil refined by a Russian freighter.

This oil has a market value called the “spot price,”

i.e., today’s price.

If it were sold today,

it would be worth around $45 per barrel.

But it won’t be sold today, because it’s en route to Rotterdam,

and will arrive in three weeks.

Once the freighter leaves, the European client sets the price

to be paid when it arrives.

It’s a “forward price”,

potentially different from the spot price.

Industrial customers will try to cover their purchases

over the longest period possible

by using what are called “option contracts,”

which are bets on future prices.

These contracts become financial products themselves

that can be exchanged on markets

and which financial investors buy and resell to get a profit.

But the change in the forward price of oil

itself has a retroactive influence

on the spot price, i.e., the price today.

Without this, there would be arbitrage opportunities

that investors would hasten to exploit.

So now, the spot price of oil

is largely determined by reference to the price

of the financial assets of future delivery of oil.

The volume of financial transactions on oil has exploded

and is around 30 times the volume of physical transactions.

Moreover, this market is largely dominated

by a small group of large corporate banks in the U.S.

But buying and selling financial products for oil

is one of the main activities of the oil companies themselves –

just as important, today,

as production, exploitation, or refining.

The second point is that the oil price is unpredictable.

In 2014, Saudi Arabia

suddenly decided to stop restricting

the amount of oil it would put on the market.

In a context of widespread instability,

this move unleashed a very sharp drop

in the reference price of oil,

which went, for Brent crude,

from $120 a barrel at the start of 2014

to $45 a barrel that summer.

The price slightly rose later on but today it’s still around $45.

This sharp fall was entirely unexpected.

Economic research, historically,

has paid little attention to the price of energy

because of the incorrect use

of what is called the “cost-share theorem”.

According to this theorem, given that the price of energy,

on average, accounts for 8% of the total price

of a finished product in Northern countries,

the contribution of energy to GDP should be around 8%,

and therefore should be negligible.

To put it more precisely this theorem holds

that the elasticity of the GDP to energy consumption

should always be equal to the share of energy in the GDP,

namely 8 - 10%.

Yet it is a grave error of reasoning

since, without energy, there’s simply no GDP.

On the contrary, GDP growth is largely due

to the growth of an economy’s energy use.

The authority in analyses of the energy market,

and of oil in particular, is the International Energy Agency.

Created in 1974 after the oil crisis,

the IEA is an independent agency in the OECD.

It is headquartered in Paris and has 29 member countries,

all of them OECD members except five:

Chile, Iceland, Israel, Mexico, and Slovenia.

Despite their teams’ expertise,

the IEA has never managed, since the 2000s

to correctly predict the price of oil,

as shown in the graph that you can see.

This illustrates our previous point. Since the 2000s

oil prices have been set mainly by financial markets

that the IEA is not mandated to analyse.

It focuses its knowledge on physical oil,

its reserves, its production, etc.

The volatility of the price of oil only became significant

after the first oil crisis of 1973.

Before that, the price of oil remained stable

for nearly the entire 20th century,

since it was set, in reality,

through negotiation between large oil firms.

We can also see that the prices we’ve seen since 2014

may seem very low, on the scale of the last two or three decades,

but are relatively high

if we look at the historical average of prices over the long term.

In short, the volatility we’ve seen

since the first oil crisis of 1973 is very significant.

French mathematicians Nicolas Bouleau and Christophe Chorro

have specifically studied this phenomenon,

showing that a high price volatility

linked to, for instance, the financialization of the market

can make it impossible to predict prices.

Mathematically this stems from the fact

that any betting system with a rather high volatility

necessarily tends almost certainly toward zero.

We could summarise this result

by saying that the financialization of oil prices

destroys the signal price information in the economy,

particularly for a commodity as fundamental as oil.

This has grave consequences,

since without a signal price to guide their decisions,

corporate heads

and, more broadly, decision-makers

in the real economy are unable to take decisions,

particularly in the long term.

What’s more, rapid changes in the price of oil have

immediate, serious consequences on entire countries.

The shale oil production sector in the U.S.

was strongly affected by the drop in prices.

Production stopped almost completely,

because the unit costs of shale production

are very high, around $35 per barrel,

compared to a cost of a few dollars per barrel

for conventional oil in Saudi Arabia.

At the country level,

the impact of this volatility of oil prices

has been very significant.

The difficulty in predicting the price of a barrel is

a major problem for countries in the South that depend on oil,

either as importers or as exporters.

The fragility that stems from this

likewise generates significant capital movements

that are, to be sure, opportunities for investors to profit,

but are also factors of instability for the entire financial sphere.

Now let’s look at the impact of changes in the price of oil

on importing countries in the South.

Oil makes up nearly 40% of the imports of India,

30% of those of Senegal, Mali, and Ukraine.

20% of the imports of Uganda, South Africa,

Chile, Indonesia, the Philippines and China.

These countries, of course,

enjoyed an improvement in their trade balance in 2014,

thanks to the fall in prices

and a reduction in their need for strong currencies.

Some of them took advantage of this in a virtuous way

to eliminate subsidies for the use of petroleum-based fuels

for corporations and households.

This was the case in Indonesia in particular.

In some macroeconomic contexts, such as in Egypt,

which has very high inflation

and an already sluggish economy due to dire shortages,

that’s much harder to do.

For the Egyptian government,

the cost of subsidies for the use of fossil fuels

was more than 10% of the GDP in 2013.

As for India, the growth of its economy

got a strong boost from the drop in oil prices,

and this effect seems to have been prolonged over 2015.

Now let’s look at the impact of changes in the price of oil

on exporting countries in the South.

Oil-exporting countries

are very dependent on oil for their trade balance.

In other words, oil usually accounts

for more than 60% of their exports.

That’s the entire problem of a global development model

based on fossil industries.

These economies have been oriented more toward exporting oil

than toward developing an independent society.

That’s the case for most economies

in the Middle East, for Russia, and for Nigeria.

These countries were hit full-force by the drop in prices

with different consequences for the Middle East,

which has enough not to worry,

and other countries that have smaller foreign currency reserves.

We can nevertheless note that in 2016 Saudi Arabia

took out its first loan in history on financial markets,

and has launched a call for international capital

for its national oil company, Aramco,

which will then have to publish the figures of its reserves.

The GPD of most exporting countries

has sharply contracted since 2014-15.

Russia, for example suffered a major contraction.

The fall in oil prices has devastated Venezuela

directly, with nearly $80 billion in lost income –

an 8% drop in its GPD, the most violent in the world –

and indirectly,

because international investors have stopped lending to it.

The Venezuelan government has responded by printing money

to meet its immediate needs,

leading to hyperinflation of nearly 500%.

The lack of foreign currency has led to shortages

of necessities like food and medicine,

providing an illustration,

if any were needed, of how vulnerable economies

based on oil income are.

The Venezuelan crisis should invite us

to quickly build models of economic development

that don’t depend, or depend less,

on fossil fuels, particularly in the South.

Indeed, the price volatility of oil

shouldn’t make us forget the physical reality.

The output of U.S. oil wells has sharply declined since 1950.

The same thing will happen, to Saudi Arabian wells

in the first half of this century.

The other reserves that exist are much harder to access,

and so, provide a much less profitable fuel, in energy terms.

Regardless of any price considerations,

a fuel whose energy output is zero or negative

cannot lead to economic growth.

Oil will therefore get necessarily and drastically more expensive,

and will be exhausted this century for geological reasons,

even in the absence of a carbon tax

or a ban on extraction for climate-related reasons.

It is therefore imperative to quickly reduce dependence

in countries in the South,

which, as the 2014 crisis has shown, is very expensive,

and to build and develop emerging economies

without this polluting resource.

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