The role of conventional and unconventional gases in Asia's energy transition.

Summary Energy and environmental issues are one of the major challenges for humanity in the 21st century. The global growth in energy demand is confronted with environmental concerns (including pollution, global warming and CO2 emission reduction), especially in rapidly growing economic regions such as Asia. Shifting the use of traditional energy sources such as coal, oil, to cleaner energy sources and renewable energy is an inevitable trend in the future. In the current context, natural gas is considered a clean energy source that will play an important role in the process of energy transition to a low-carbon economy. The consequences for natural gas markets can be considerable. The prerequisite for such a development is a large supply of natural gas. The development of unconventional gas, in particular shale gas, provides an opportunity to expand global gas supply, as demonstrated by the "shale gas revolution" in the United States. This has profoundly changed regional gas markets. However, this "revolution" is hardly replicable to other regions of the world. This thesis demonstrates in particular that, apart from geological factors, institutional (taxation, property rights), economic (prices, technologies) and organizational (market liberalization) conditions are necessary to ensure large-scale development of unconventional resources. This thesis shows that these conditions are mostly not met either in Europe or in Asia (notably in China). Therefore, a transition to gas to meet the climate challenges in Asia will be done through imports and not through the region's own production. From three POLES model scenarios based on assumptions of climate policy, shale gas development and rapid increase of gas demand in the energy mix, especially in Asia, two main conclusions emerge. First of all, the importance of the development of shale gas in the USA and its low production cost lead to an abundant and competitive gas supply compared to other energies, especially compared to coal. Consequently, even without a climate policy, the conditions are in place for the share of natural gas in the energy mix to grow. Second, a strong climate policy has contradictory effects on the importance of natural gas in the energy mix of Asian countries. On the one hand, it allows a greater penetration of natural gas in their energy mix. But at the same time, limiting energy demand, the volumes of natural gas demanded are only slightly higher than in scenarios without climate policy.