Research Library

Mahmoud A. El-Gamal discusses the importance of U.S. monetary policy changes and oil markets. He highlights the relationships among interest rate movements, the behavior of traders, and oil price formation to argue the importance of watching Federal Reserve actions when analyzing the market for oil.

Ken Medlock highlights the importance of supply chains and legacy infrastructures for the success of new technologies and stresses the role of coordination along supply chains to drive value. A holistic awareness of economics, politics, regulation, and resource scarcity is critical for developing market structures that support investment for effective decarbonization.

Emerging artificial intelligence (AI) tools could prove an important contributor to successfully decarbonizing energy. Christopher Bronk discusses how they can enhance our ability to process and understand extensive data streams in energy, policy, technology, and geopolitics, which could transform the way we process information and assess regional and global situations in real time.

Rachel A. Meidl discusses why sustainability requires an approach that includes environmental, social, and economic factors across the entire supply chain spanning the life cycle of energy systems. Sustainability must move beyond a narrow focus on carbon metrics to address broader impacts and drive innovation. As companies emphasize sustainability imperatives, life cycle management will become increasingly important.

The EU’s withdrawal from the Energy Charter Treaty may foreshadow an eventual end to investor-state dispute settlement (ISDI) — a legal mechanism that permits foreign investors to sue a country over actions that harm their investments. A report by fellow David A. Gantz outlines the history of ISDI provisions in global trade agreements and examines what ISDI’s end might mean for the future of investment and trade in the U.S., EU, and other nations.

Ukraine's power grid is under severe strain, with Russian attacks reducing electricity generation capacity to just one-third of prewar levels. In a new working paper, Gabriel Collins and Kenneth B. Medlock, III suggest prioritizing decentralized, mobile power solutions to help Ukraine survive the winter and prevent a humanitarian disaster. They emphasize the critical need for international support to help Ukraine rebuild a more resilient energy system.

If China coercively annexed Taiwan, it would be a devastating loss for America. This paper assesses key consequences and argues that the U.S. must urgently prevent such an outcome.

Farm labor shortages put pressure on the United States’ food security, the livelihoods of farmers and farmworkers, and the economies and identity of rural communities. In a new Center for the U.S and Mexico research paper, Alejandro Gutiérrez-Li, assistant professor at North Carolina State University, examines the crucial role played by Mexican immigrant farmworkers in putting food on American tables.

Addressing non-medical drivers of health (NMDOH) is crucial to improving health outcomes and containing health care costs. A brief by Jacquie Klotz, Charles W. Mathias, and Elena M. Marks reports findings from policy crowdsourcing workshops. Researchers, practitioners, and policymakers joined the Texas NMDOH Consortium to collaborate on identifying NMDOH policy opportunities in Texas. In the Fall of 2024, the Texas NMDOH Consortium will publish policy recommendations to elaborate on opportunities to advance the integration of non-medical interventions into the health care system.

Texas’ growing population produces a mounting demand on the state’s power grid. In his recent testimony written for the Texas Senate Committee on Business and Commerce, Kenneth B. Medlock III, senior director of the Center for Energy Studies, examined the current power capacities of ERCOT, Texas’ grid operator. With support from a recent CES report, he outlined ways to address ERCOT’s structural risk through policy to promote investor and consumer confidence in Texas’ power supply.