Almutairi, Hossa

  • Primary Program Energy Macro- & Microeconomics
  • Research Interests Energy Economics, Oil Markets, Climate Policies, Behavioral Economics

Biography

Dr. Hossa Almutairi is currently a Principal Fellow at KAPSARC, and her research focuses on energy economics, oil markets, and climate policies. During the Saudi G20 Presidency, she served as the Sherpa of Think20 (T20), which is the research and policy advice network for the G20. Additionally, she was the lead co-chair of the T20 task force, “Sustainable Energy, Water and Food Systems.” Prior to joining KAPSARC, Dr. Almutairi was a faculty member at the University of Wilfrid Laurier, Canada. Her research contributions have been featured in several reputable journals, and she was the co-recipient of the 2023 OPEC Award for the Best Energy Research Paper.

Publications

See all Hossa’s publications
  • Discussion papers
  • Methodology paper
  • Reports
  • KAPSARC journal articles
  • External journal articles
  • Think20 (T20)
Pandemic, Ukraine, OPEC+ and Strategic Stockpiles: Taming the Oil Market in Turbulent Times

Pandemic, Ukraine, OPEC+ and Strategic Stockpiles: Taming the Oil Market in Turbulent Times

With a simple decomposition method, we estimate the monthly shifts in global oil demand and non-OPEC+ supply since 2010. We find evidence that during the January 2017 to December 2023 period, OPEC+ attempted to stabilize the price of crude oil well below the values assessed by market observers. Using a structural model of OPEC+’s behavior, we find that judgmental errors regarding the size of market shocks that OPEC+ attempted to offset significantly increased after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic due to the unprecedented nature and size of those shocks. Despite this, without OPEC+’s actions, the price volatility would have been significantly higher than actual, would have nearly doubled during the pre-pandemic period, and would have been higher by 86% during the pandemic and by 28% during the Ukraine war. Our results also suggest that measures implemented by other countries, such as coordinated releases from national stockpiles of crude oil, reduced price volatility by at least a fifth during the Ukraine war, a factor that OPEC+ appears to have factored into its production plans.

12th November 2024
Decarbonizing Saudi Arabia’s Residential Sector: Designing Behavioral Interventions for Efficient and Sustainable Energy Consumption

Decarbonizing Saudi Arabia’s Residential Sector: Designing Behavioral Interventions for Efficient and Sustainable Energy Consumption

There is a consensus in the literature regarding the significant role of behavioral change in reducing the level of residential energy consumption. However, there is an ongoing debate concerning the most effective mechanisms and instruments with which to promote energy-efficient actions among individuals. In the Saudi Arabian context, leveraging behavioral economic concepts can play a crucial role in assessing how individual behaviors and lifestyles shape residential energy usage and influence energy consumption patterns. This study proposes a framework for designing behavioral interventions, including social norms, high-alert messages, and energy-saving tips, to reduce residential energy consumption and greenhouse gas emission levels in Saudi Arabia.

24th June 2024
Managing the Oil Market Under Misinformation: A Reasonable Quest?

Managing the Oil Market Under Misinformation: A Reasonable Quest?

This paper examines the type and quality of information that OPEC needs to stabilize the oil market. We extend our previous structural model, in which OPEC makes potential mistakes in judging the size of market shocks, to now include the possibility that OPEC misestimates how the market price would react to any given adjustment to its production level.  Thus, we present a model that incorporates both observational errors regarding physical market developments as well as potentially erroneous judgments regarding the elasticities of supply and demand.  We use the model to determine the counterfactual (unstabilized) prices that would have prevailed if OPEC, acting under a broad range of misinformation, had not attempted to stabilize the price. We find that misestimation of the demand and supply elasticities generally increases the computed counterfactual price volatility.  By comparison to historical volatility, these elevated counterfactual volatilities strengthen our previous finding that OPEC has substantially decreased price volatility by regulating production from its buffer of spare capacity.  This is true of the OPEC+ period and the period prior to OPEC+.

28th May 2024
Assessing Climate Mitigation Benefits of Public Support to CCS-EOR: An Economic Analysis

Assessing Climate Mitigation Benefits of Public Support to CCS-EOR: An Economic Analysis

Government support for CCS-EOR projects is sometimes contested on the grounds that the resulting increase in oil production undermines their environmental benefits. Addressing this concern requires determining the effects of implementing CCS-EOR on global CO2 emissions. This paper presents a simple approach based on a marginal reasoning consistent with economic decision-making. It produces analytical formulas that account for the effects on the global oil market of incentivizing CCS-EOR. Our results suggest that, from an economic perspective, CCS-EOR is a technology that mitigates global emissions, but the emissions reduction is less than the stored quantity of CO2. Based on our results, we discuss the size of the fiscal incentives granted by the US Inflation Reduction Act to support CCS-EOR.

8th June 2023
Resilience of Saudi Arabia’s Economy to Oil Shocks: Effects of Economic Reforms

Resilience of Saudi Arabia’s Economy to Oil Shocks: Effects of Economic Reforms

We assess the extent to which the implementation of Saudi Vision 2030 policies enhances the Saudi economy’s resilience to oil price and production shocks, and to the productivity of tradable and non-tradable goods. We extend Blazquez et al.’s (2021) dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to capture the country’s economic diversification policies and build a resilience index based on impulse responses to shocks.    

23rd September 2022
Sectoral and Economy-Wide Effects of Domestic Energy Price Reforms in Saudi Arabia

Sectoral and Economy-Wide Effects of Domestic Energy Price Reforms in Saudi Arabia

This paper simulates the sectoral and economy-wide consequences of deregulating energy prices in Saudi Arabia. Our analysis is based on KAPSARC’s general equilibrium energy model (KEMGE), a new hybrid computable general equilibrium model (CGE). The model examines the effects of full price deregulation, starting in 2019, on economic activity and revenue in the year 2030.

19th August 2020
Nudging Toward Sustainability: Behavioral Interventions in Saudi Arabia’s Residential Electricity Consumption

Nudging Toward Sustainability: Behavioral Interventions in Saudi Arabia’s Residential Electricity Consumption

Residential energy consumption is responsible for significant global energy consumption and associated emissions. As a result, households are a prime focus for behavior-modifying interventions. Household energy conservation can be achieved through changes in consumption patterns and investments in energy-efficient products, both of which are influenced by policy interventions.

8th July 2024
Will Government Support for CCS-EOR Lead to Reduced Emissions?

Will Government Support for CCS-EOR Lead to Reduced Emissions?

Government support for CCS-EOR projects is often contested on the grounds that the resulting increase in oil production undermines their environmental benefits. This paper summarizes a simple approach based on a marginal reasoning consistent with economic decision-making. It produces analytical formulas that account for the effects on the global oil market of incentivizing CCS-EOR. Our results suggest that, from an economic perspective, CCS-EOR is a technology that mitigates global emissions, but the emissions reduction is less than the stored quantity of CO2. Based on our results, we examine the size of the subsidies granted by the US Inflation Reduction Act for CCS-EOR projects.

14th December 2023
Carbon tax based on the emission factor: a bilevel programming approach

Carbon tax based on the emission factor: a bilevel programming approach

Journal of Global Optimization

2014
Modeling, analysis, and evaluation of a carbon tax policy based on the emission factor

Modeling, analysis, and evaluation of a carbon tax policy based on the emission factor

Computers & Industrial Engineering

2014
A new Lagrangean approach to the pooling problem

A new Lagrangean approach to the pooling problem

Journal of Global Optimization

2009

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