Analyzing the distributional effects of fuel taxation in China

As an effective policy instrument to reduce energy consumption and CO₂ emissions, the effects of fuel taxation on income distribution have been the critical factor that determines whether a fuel tax could be acceptable in China. This paper estimates the distributional effects of a fuel tax on households in various income groups by using the input-output model. Results indicate that the total distributional effects of fuel taxes are moderately progressive; that is, high-income households would bear more tax burden compared to low-income households. In addition, the indirect effects are larger than the direct effects. Moreover, the Kakwani and Suits indices show that fuel excise taxes are progressive, implying that a fuel tax could improve the unfair income distribution. In order to reduce the negative impact of fuel taxes on low-income households, it is necessary for the government to design a reasonable redistribution mechanism of tax revenue or adopt compensatory measures such as the transfer payments targeted on low-income groups.     

Evaluation of fuel options for a commercial mhd plant in India

The choice of fuels for a commercial open-cycle MHD generator is not as simple as for a conventional plant. After the commissioning operations and the power runs of the Indian pilot MHD plant, the question of early commercialization is being debated. In this context, this paper looks at the spectrum of fossil fuels available in India and evaluates their relative suitability for commercial MHD generators. The attainable plasma temperature, electrical conductivity and the available fuel energy at the combustor outlet are taken as the comparison yardsticks. Standard operating parameters for commercial installations have been assumed. The comparison, which in the Indian context has been limited to coal-based fuels and natural gas, indicates the latter as the fuel of choice followed by gasified coal.     

Modeling fuel efficiency for heavy duty vehicles (HDVs) in India

Transport sector accounts for almost 70% consumption of diesel in India. With increased dependency on road transportation for freight transport, there is a need to develop fuel-efficiency standards for the heavy duty vehicles (HDVs). This study models the fuel efficiency of the existing fleet of HDVs and compares it with the world’s best practices. The model uses the technical details of the existing HDV fleet and the prescribed driving cycles to assess fuel efficiency. The results of the model are validated with the actual test results of fuel efficiency observed for HDVs in India. The model presents a fuel economy of 2.65 km/l for truck and bus model of given specification. The validated model is then used for evaluating the potential of different strategies to improve fuel efficiency. The models estimate a potential of about 36% improvement in the fuel efficiency in the HDVs in India through improvements in thermal efficiency, reduction in rolling resistance, and reduction in vehicle weight. The study provides a direction for the possible fuel efficiency improvements in HDV sector in India.     

Life cycle assessment of Jatropha biodiesel as transportation fuel in rural India

Since 2003 India has been actively promoting the cultivation of Jatropha on unproductive and degraded lands (wastelands) for the production of biodiesel suitable as transportation fuel. In this paper the life cycle energy balance, global warming potential, acidification potential, eutrophication potential and land use impact on ecosystem quality is evaluated for a small scale, low-input Jatropha biodiesel system established on wasteland in rural India. In addition to the life cycle assessment of the case at hand, the environmental performance of the same system expanded with a biogas installation digesting seed cake was quantified. The environmental impacts were compared to the life cycle impacts of a fossil fuel reference system delivering the same amount of products and functions as the Jatropha biodiesel system under research. The results show that the production and use of Jatropha biodiesel triggers an 82% decrease in non-renewable energy requirement (Net Energy Ratio, NER = 1.85) and a 55% reduction in global warming potential (GWP) compared to the reference fossil-fuel based system. However, there is an increase in acidification (49%) and eutrophication (430%) from the Jatropha system relative to the reference case. Although adding biogas production to the system boosts the energy efficiency of the system (NER = 3.40), the GWP reduction would not increase (51%) due to additional CH₄ emissions. For the land use impact, Jatropha improved the structural ecosystem quality when planted on wasteland, but reduced the functional ecosystem quality. Fertilizer application (mainly N) is an important contributor to most negative impact categories. Optimizing fertilization, agronomic practices and genetics are the major system improvement options.     

International experiences of ethanol as transport fuel: Policy implications for India

The need for biofuels, particularly liquid ones like ethanol and biodiesel, for transport has been felt by most of the countries and their governments have been trying to promote these fuels. Compared to petroleum, the use of biofuels for transport is still quite low in nearly every country. By far the largest production and use is of ethanol in the United States and Brazil, where similar volumes are used—many times higher than in any other country. Even then, ethanol represents less than 3% of transport fuel in USA and a little more than 50% of gasoline demand (by volume) in Brazil. However many countries, including the USA, Canada, several European countries (and the European Union), Australia and Japan including India are considering or have adopted a variety of policies that could result in much higher biofuels use over the next decade. This paper makes an attempt to draw upon the cross-country international experiences of ethanol as transport fuel to suggest policy implications for India     

Communication on energy: The Norwegian taxation debate

A working group of the Norwegian Ministry of Finance has recently produced a report on possible structural changes to the fiscal system applied to petroleum exploitation. This report recommended that two types of changes be seriously examined and the oil companies have recently presented their views on these proposals. Here a comparison is made between the two proposed systems and the current one as applied to very marginal fields. The comparative effects on investors depend on the size of discount rate employed and the proportion of debt finance utilized. It is unlikely that the proposed changes will significantly improve incentives to develop marginal fields.     

CO2 emissions reduction by price deregulation and fossil fuel taxation A case study of Indonesia

As environmental issues, and the issue of global warming in particular, rise to the top of the international agenda, developing nations are faced with a major question: how to confront these environmental problems and simultaneously address a number of more pressing developmental imperatives? This paper tries to answer that question on a limited scale using Indonesia as a case study. The study indicates that by deregulating energy prices and imposing different levels of taxation on fossil fuels, Indonesia could reduce its CO₂ emissions without considerably suppressing the growth of its economy. In the long run, however, these policies cannot cope with the inevitable rise in coal-use in Indonesia, due to constraints on domestic natural gas and oil resources. Limiting the growth of coal consumption in the future will require direct technological intervention in the supply and demand of energy and a shift in current energy export and import policies.     

Assessment of the fuel wood of India: A case study based on fuel characteristics of some indigenous species of Arunachal Pradesh

Biomass in the form of fuelwood has been a source of energy for many centuries all over the world. In rural India, fuelwood remains the first choice of energy source. Arunachal Pradesh is home to many different tree species; so far most of the fuelwoods of Arunachal Pradesh have never been studied for their fuel characteristics. This study is carried out with the following objectives: (i) Identification and selection of indigenous fuelwood species, which are widely distributed throughout Arunachal Pradesh, North East India; (ii) quantitative and qualitative analysis of these fuelwoods; and (iii) to rank these fuelwoods according to their fuel value index.     

Assessing energy tax systems: The effects of energy taxation in Switzerland

The Swiss Federal Administration has recently proposed the urgent introduction of an energy tax. In this article the authors describe the range of tax structures which could be designed from various combinations of basic components. The fiscal, economic and administrative repercussions of various energy tax structures are traced through and compared with those of a value added tax. The authors examine, in particular, the effects of an energy tax in Switzerland and the interactions between such a tax and federal fiscal policies. The choice of a particular energy tax structure is a normative decision which must be left to the political process. The authors hope that this article will be useful in making such processes more transparent, more rational and more effective.     

North Sea oil taxation in Norway

Since 1963, the Norwegian government has developed a complex fiscal regime covering the activities of oil companies in the North Sea. The purpose of this article is to identify and quantify the financial effects of the fiscal system on operating companies involved in the Norwegian sector. The emphasis is on the effect of the tax package introduced by the government in the Odelsting Proposition No 26 of February 1975. The impact of the tax is not found to be well related to the profitability of fields and the sensitivity of the tax burden to key variables such as reserves, oil price, capital and operating costs and inflation is examined. The effect of quasi-fiscal measures, particularly of government participation via Statoil, is also examined.     

Achieving sustainable development goals through adoption of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles in India: An empirical analysis

Hydrogen is a growing facilitator for a multisectoral transition to a renewable energy-based economy. Despite this, there is negligible scholarly literature examining the connections between the hydrogen economy and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) established by the United Nations. In this empirical investigation, we demonstrate a correlation between adopting Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs) and their direct and indirect impact on SDGs (#7, 9, 11, 12, 13,14 and 15). This empirical investigation was performed based on 358 valid sample responses from the pan-India survey. Utilising structural equation modelling, the hypotheses were tested, and the research model was validated. The findings revealed that the adoption of HFCV has a positive impact on SDGs. The results confirm that policy implications significantly change public perception regarding high cost and infrastructure readiness. Keeping the finding in mind, we recommend that the fuel retailers create more hydrogen refuelling stations across the country to ease infrastructure bottlenecks. Further, governments at various levels should provide financial benefits to green hydrogen producers, fuel cell manufacturers, HFCV manufacturers, and early adopters of HFCVs in India.     

The usage of waste hydrogen from outlet gas as a fuel in different fuel cells

This paper aims at selecting different types of fuel cells using an MINLP (mixed-integer nonlinear programming) model, whilst considering the usage of waste hydrogen from the outlet gas. Hydrogen separation from the outlet gas is a good alternative from the economical and environmental perspectives.     

The economic impact of strengthening fuel quality regulation—reducing sulfur content in diesel fuel

This paper investigates the impact of strengthening vehicle emission regulation on economic activities. The government attempts to use three regulation measures to protect air quality from transportation emission. The measures include the aggregate limit (bubbles), the vehicle emission standard, and the fuel quality standard. Especially, we focus on the economic impact of reducing sulfur content in diesel fuel quality standard. Sulfur content in diesel fuel is one of the main factors in worsening local air quality. The emission from diesel vehicle accounts for 51.8% of total vehicle emission in Korea. If sulfur content reduction regulation is implemented, then the petroleum industry should build more facility to produce low sulfur content diesel, leading to additional production costs and increasing prices and decreasing outputs. We use computable general equilibrium model to analyze how the sulfur reduction regulation affects economic activities and trace out local emission reduction cost and GDP loss. And we suggest the tax-recycling mechanism to mitigate the negative economic costs due to the sulfur reduction regulation.     

Analyses of fuel utilization in microfluidic fuel cell

A microfluidic fuel cell is a miniature power source, which potentially could be used in micro electronic equipments, laptop computers, mobile phones and video cameras. In recent reports, the idea of a microfluidic fuel cell without using a polymer electrolyte membrane is proposed, whereby the laminar nature of the flow in the micro-channels is used to keep the anode and cathode streams separated such that adverse electrochemical reactions do not take place at the two electrode polarities. Since such cells are restricted by their size, improvement in fuel utilization would increase the cell efficiency by several degrees. In the present study, an improvement in fuel utilization is proposed by altering the design of the microfluidic fuel cell. In particular, a sulfuric acid stream is introduced between the fuel (HCOOH) and oxidizer (O₂ in H₂SO₄) streams to improve fuel utilization. Further improvement in fuel utilization is possible by changing the aspect ratio of the cell from 0.1 to 1. The fuel utilization of a cell with an aspect ratio of 0.1 is 14.1%, which increases to 16% when a sulfuric acid stream is introduced to prevent mixing of the fuel and oxidizer streams. The fuel utilization increases to 19% with the change in aspect ratio from 0.1 to 10, which further increases to 32% with the introduction of a sulfuric acid stream.     

Effects of changes in UK North Sea oil taxation

Changes in North Sea oil tax structure were introduced by the UK government in mid-1979. The new system is aimed at increasing revenues to the state without damage to exploitation and production. This paper considers the effects which the new tax regime, and each of its components, will have on different types of field being exploited under various circumstances. The analysis also considers sensitivity to capital cost inflation, effects on multi-field operation and the results of two other possible tax schemes. It is found that the new tax scheme will considerably alter the structure of the tax burden and will increase the overall tax take. Marginal tax rates will also increase, not least for some fields with low expected returns. The new scheme will, however, continue to favour capital intensive exploitation techniques.     

The Swedish wood fuel market

In Sweden, wood fuels are traditionally used in the Swedish forest products industry and for heating of single-family houses. More recently they are also become established as an energy source for district heating and electricity production. Energy policy, especially the energy taxation system, has favoured wood fuels and other biofuels, mainly for environmental reasons. There is now an established commercial market for wood fuels in the district heating sector, which amounts to 45 PJ and is growing 20 per cent annually. Price levels have been stable in current prices for a decade, mainly because of good access to wood fuels. Price levels are dominated by production costs on a market that is largely governed by the buyer.It is expected that the use of wood fuels will increase in Sweden in the future, which will push a further development of this sector on the market and bring about technological changes in the area.     

The Nordic fuel cell effort

Fuel cell technologies are playing an increasing part in Scandinavia's efforts to minimize the production of greenhouse gases. In this article Ed Fontes, Eva Nilsson and Patrik Bosander provide an overview of the part that Scandinavian countries have played in the development of fuel cell systems.     

The effect of the German and British environmental taxation reforms: A simple assessment

This article implements a simple econometric approach to assess the effect of the environmental tax reforms introduced in Germany and the UK. Despite the very simple econometric approach adopted in this paper, in the case of the energy demand, our results do not differ markedly from those obtained from complicated multi-sectoral econometric models. In the case of the labour demand, our results differ from the estimates obtained from econometric models where the employment level is not directly influenced by the energy price. On the other hand, our results are more similar to those obtained from models where the level of employment is directly influenced by the energy price. Confirming the findings of Bosquet [2000. Environmental tax reform: does it work? A survey of the empirical evidence. Ecological Economics 34, 19–32] and OECD [2004. Environment and Employment: An Assessment Working Party on National Environmental Policy OECD, Paris], we conclude that environmental tax reforms can deliver substantial reductions in energy consumption while having small effects on the level of employment, effect which can be positive, depending on the size of the reduction in the labour costs and the value of cross-price elasticities.     

The taxation of UK oil and gas production: Why the windfalls got away

Starting with evidence that United Kingdom Continental Shelf oil and gas companies have benefitted very disproportionately from the recent period of extraordinarily high oil prices, this paper traces the history of this weakness in the UK’s petroleum fiscal regime. Evidence is provided that the progressive relaxations in the UK’s petroleum fiscal regime in 1983, 1987–1988 and 1993 were: largely unnecessary to stimulate the development of new, smaller, ‘marginal’ fields; misguided in their assumption that such fields were more costly to develop than earlier counterparts or larger contemporary fields; and impotent compared with the effects of oil price movements. The paper concludes with a conceptualisation which illuminates why these failures of policy were not just random: they emerged from the UK’s ‘non-proprietorial’ stance with respect to the country’s oil and gas resources, a stance which assumes responsibility for oil company profitability and vainly tries to counter market forces at the expense of government revenues.     

The economics of hydrogen as a fuel

Second Law costs together with an accounting for the cost of environmental or health hazards constitute Real Costs, i.e. costs seen from the viewpoint of the majority. Time at which the costs of various competing fuels have to be compared is the time at which they will have to be used. This is not that at which they will be competitive compared with the exhausting fuels, but some years (perhaps as much as two decades) earlier.The First Law costs of H₂ from coal are $4.00/MBTU. No other methods compete at this time. Biomass is likely to do so if developed. Photo-oriented methods might do so.Second Law costs are little known and need research. For automotive transportation, H₂ is around 1.5 times more efficient in burning than gasoline. Pollution costs would be 13–30% of the costs of a fuel from coal. H₂ gas storage in cars would add around 30% to these costs.Synthetic gasoline could not be made after 2010 for greenhouse effect reasons. But H₂ could be made from coal until 2040, if CO₂ is rejected seaward. This would have an important effect on amortization considerations. The real costs of H₂ from coal will be around 1/3 the costs of synthetic gasoline from coal.Among the newer concepts for H₂ is radiation of H₂O with direct concentrated solar light.