EMF SR 7: Quantifying Oil Disruption Risks Through Expert Judgment

This report describes a methodologyfor extracting and quantifying expert views on the likelihood of atleast one oil disruption over the next ten years. Experts attended aseries of workshops held by the Energy Modeling Forum to develop a riskassessment framework for use in understanding key uncertainties inthinking about energy security. This framework draws on decision andrisk analysis, methodologies which have been used to analyze adifferent range of topics where uncertainty is important and whereobjective and rigorous standards can hold up to scrutiny by a varietyof affected parties.

The approach identified uncertain events in three broad areas thatspanned political and military conditions, oil shortfalls, andpotential supply offsets. Participating experts evaluated uncertaintiesassociated with a number of conditions that could influence themagnitude of an oil disruption. These lower-level uncertainties arethen combined mathematically to derive an overall assessment of thelikelihood of oil disruptions of varying magnitudes. The studyaddressed both short (less than 6 months) and long (more than 6 months)disruptions.