Vice Chancellor's 30 PhD Scholarships: Agent-based Energy Modelling

If anyone knows anyone who might be interested in PhD studentships, they are now on our web site: http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/research/the-graduate-school/vice-chancellors-phd-scholarships.cfm

An advert willappear in the Times Higher tomorrow. Details will also appear on findaphd.com and jobs.ac.uk in the near future.

Please bring to anyone's attention who might be interested, particularly the project "Energy Scenario Planning: An agent-based model of the availability of global conventional oil supply"

Ref: Hallock, J.L., Tharakan, P., Hall, C.A.S., Jefferson, M., Wei, Wu., 2004. Forecasting the limits to the availability and diversity of global conventional oil supply. Energy 29, 1673–1696.

Scenario Planning - internally consistent, sufficiently  relevant and detailed stories of what may occur in the future - has been  used as a strategic tool to cope with, but not to disguise, the  economics of uncertainty. As a qualitative framework, scenario planning  provides the ideas, elements and building blocks, which can be  communicated to leaders to allow them to cope more effectively with  uncertainty and change.   Due to the critical importance of oil to modern economic activity, and  oil’s non-renewable nature, it is extremely important to try to estimate  possible trajectories of future oil production while accounting for  uncertainties in resource estimates and demand growth. We are inviting  applications for a studentship to develop several alternate scenarios  for conventional oil supply for the period 2002-2060 using the novel  Agent-based Computational Economics (ACE) research methodology. ACE  provides a new and fundamental standard of explanation, in which one  ‘grows’ the macrophenomenon of interest (country-level oil supply),  given certain sets of microfoundations (e.g. resource availability,  future demand)  Using country-specific microfoundations of (i) the domestic consumption of oil, (ii) the projected growth rates of oil consumption,  (iii)the volume of oil originally present before any extraction (EUR),  (iv) the annual production for 2001, (v) the cumulative production to  date, and (vi)estimates of oil remaining to date, the project will  develop bottom-up simulations of county-level ‘peak oil production’

The successful applicant will be part of the ACEGES team: http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/lmbs/research/cibs/cibs-scenario-planning/cibs-scenario-planning_home.cfm