چكيده به لاتين
Abstract
Safeguarding the energy security is one of the most important energy policy goals of every country. The objective of energy security is to assure sufficient and reliable supplies of energy at reasonable prices and in ways that do not threaten major national values and objectives. Concerning the rich resources of natural gas and high exploration rate of new gas fields, Iran in the upcoming years has the potential to become a major exporter of natural gas in the world. but due to Iran special geopolitical position, being enclosed by two strategic resources of natural gas and crude oil, i.e. Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf, and terrorist attacks and other unrests in Middle East, Central Asia, and Caucasus, securing energy demand and increasing the volume of Iran natural gas export has turned into a critical issue.
The aim of this thesis is to develop a composite index for evaluating the gas demand security of Iran in a 23-years period from 1993 to 2015. Thus, after understanding and analyzing the status of the natural gas production in Iran and identifying the current and potential export markets, three dimensions including political, economic and infrastructural ones have been considered and six individual indicators including importer purchasing power, transportation cost, Iran’s political stability, importer’s political stability, economic dependence, and gas export dependence have been developed to assess the vulnerability or sensitivity of Iran’s gas exports to sudden disruptions in its demand. Time series data of every indicator has been collected in the aforementioned period and after normalizing these data, principal component analysis has been applied to weight the individual indicators and synthesize them into the gas demand security index of Iran. Analyzing the calculated weights of indicators, shows that political stability of a gas importer country has the most and the political stability of gas exporter has the least share in determining the value of gas demand security index of Iran. Finally, according to contribution of the indicators in determining the main model, several policies have been suggested for enhancing the gas exports demand security of Iran.
Keywords: Energy Demand Security, Composite Index, Natural Gas, Iran, Principal Component Analysis.
