Investment portfolios under uncertainty for utilizing natural gas resources

Numerous reasons including lower carbon and sulfur emissions have led to the rapid growth of natural gas (NG) demand. However, more than one-third of world NG reserves are stranded, i.e., either remote (e.g., offshore) or in regions with saturated markets. This reality makes the investment decisions complex and uncertain for NG field developers. In this study, we consider the case of a company that wishes to develop a stranded natural gas reserve for some potential nearby markets under uncertain prices of crude oil and feed gas, and demands of liquefied NG (LNG), compressed NG (CNG), and gas-to-liquid (GTL) products. We present a 2-stage stochastic mixed-integer linear program (MILP) that yields maximumENPV (expected NPV) decisions on production capacities, market allocations, and delivery vessels. The small model size allows us to consider many stochastic scenarios in our scenario-based approach. We illustrate our approach using several examples. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.