Search

Oil, Gas, and Mining: A Sourcebook for Understanding the Extractive Industries provides developing countries with a technical understanding and practical options around oil, gas, and mining sector development issues. A central premise of the Sourcebook is that good technical knowledge can better inform political, economic, and social choices with respect to sector development and the related risks and opportunities. The guidance provided by the Sourcebook assumes a broad set of overarching principles, all centered on good governance and directed at achieving positive and broadly based sustainable development outcomes. This Sourcebook is rich in presenting options to challenges, on the understanding that contexts and needs vary, and that there is much to be gained from appreciating the lessons learned from a broad set of experiences.

This book is a product of investigations conducted within the Global Utility Research Unit (Guru) of Agici Corporate Finance (Milan, Italy). More specifically, it is the result of a project developed by the Observatory on Alliances and Strategies in the Pan-European Utility Market set-up seven years ago with the contribution of Accenture. The project, entitled “Pan-European Gas Industry Scenario – Truth and Lies”, was presented at the 2008 Milan annual international conference (www. agici. it). I would therefore like to thank Luca Cesari, Claudio Arcudi and Massimo Pagella from Accenture for their continued support. The scope of this book is to shed some light on a market, that of natural gas, which is highly complex and at the same time of fundamental importance for Europe for at least the next 20 years. We do not intend to build a theory but only to develop a better understanding of the key factors. We fully recognise that the each of the issues we cover deserves further investigation and we are also well aware that we may have omitted a number of important considerations and topics. These shortcomings are - at least in part - justified by the desire to keep the book to a r- sonable size for editorial reasons.