EMF SR 7 Quantifying Oil Disruption Risks Through Expert Judgment

This report describes a methodology for extracting and quantifying expert views on the likelihood of at least one oil disruption over the next ten years. Experts attended a series of workshops held by the Energy Modeling Forum to develop a risk assessment framework for use in understanding key uncertainties in thinking about energy security. This framework draws on decision and risk analysis, methodologies which have been used to analyze a different range of topics where uncertainty is important and where objective and rigorous standards can hold up to scrutiny by a variety of affected parties.

The approach identified uncertain events in three broad areas that spanned political and military conditions, oil shortfalls, and potential supply offsets. Participating experts evaluated uncertainties associated with a number of conditions that could influence the magnitude of an oil disruption. These lower-level uncertainties are then combined mathematically to derive an overall assessment of the likelihood of oil disruptions of varying magnitudes. The study addressed both short (less than 6 months) and long (more than 6 months) disruptions.