Studying National Oil Security With A GIS Approach

Oil security is related to many aspects, such as oil supply, transportation and storage, as well as environment, economy and employment, etc. Oil supply security has become an important issue since the domestic production can't meet the rocket growing domestic demand resulted from the growing economy in the early 1990s. A lot of research has been done from the economic and social science aspects, yet little has been done from GIS angle. The GIS approach is believed to be potentially able to add a lot of value to the national oil security study as the oil reserves, oil consumption and production, and the hubs of oil production and consumption are highly geographically distributed and oriented. Oil production, consumption and reserve data from 165 countries has been collected and analyzed. Three main aspects of national oil security, namely, oil supply security, economic security and environment security has been quantified and visualized with a concept hierarchy and visualization methodology. Three main aspects of national oil security have been quantified with conceptual and mathematical modeling and then visualized on a commercial GIS platform. The main study objective is to provide a GIS methodology, technical solution and geoinformatics support for analyzing and monitoring national oil security. The main subjects studied in the paper include but are not limited to the following aspects: the concept study of national oil security, such as the quantification and visualization of national oil security concept, which could be also considered an initiative to quantify and standardize the social science concept with a GIS approach; to monitor the environmental aspects of national oil security; to monitor the supply aspects of national oil security; to monitor the economic aspects of national oil security; and to monitor and analyze the tempo-spatial distribution of oil reserve, production and consumption globally to provide analogs and information for national oil security decision making process. The main innovative ideas and work covered in the paper include: systematically studied the national oil security with a GIS methodology, thus developed a new frontier for GIS application; provided a GIS model and technical solution for studying national oil security;...