Is hotelling's rule relevant to domestic oil production?

Geoffrey Black, Jeffrey T. Lafrance

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

19 Scopus citations

Abstract

A model of oil supply from known reserves is developed to incorporate geological and engineering principles in the oil field operator's decision problem. Oil production from existing wells within an oil field is isolated from the drilling of new wells. The geo-engineering rule known as maximum efficient recovery (MER) is nested within the economic model to test the hypothesis that production from established fields is invariant to the price of oil. The econometric model is applied to quarterly data from seven Montana oil fields. The MER model is strongly rejected by the data, providing evidence that oil supply models should include economic as well as geo-engineering principles.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)149-169
Number of pages21
JournalJournal of Environmental Economics and Management
Volume36
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 1998

Keywords

  • Hotelling's Rule
  • Maximum Efficient Recovery
  • Oil Supply

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