Global Emergence of Natural Gas, a Complex Systems Analysis

This paper presents the application of a sociotechnical modeling framework to capture regional dependencies in the international natural gas market in context with the global energy marketplace at large. Soft systems methods were used to produce conceptual models of flow and interaction in order to inform the design of analytical models. First, this research project captured and analyzed the flows of natural gas in international markets by developing a conceptual model of the global natural gas infrastructure and future growth options at the regional level. Policies, players, infrastructure, and markets all exist at the global, regional, and national level to make up the present-day natural gas landscape. Second, the research team worked to model the overall global natural gas sociotechnical enterprise and its future growth options to understand the regional versus global interdependencies and their likely effect on the changing natural gas landscape. The results capture emerging trends in the system that may not be obvious without a systemic analysis and capture gaps in existing predictive models of system performance.