• 대한산업공학회지
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• 제41권3호
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• pp.259-266
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• 2015

Among many energy resources, natural gas has recently received a remarkable amount of attention, particularly from the electrical generation industry. This is in part due to increasing shale gas production, providing an environment-friendly fossil fuel, and high risk of nuclear power. Because South Korea, the world's second largest LNG importing nation after Japan, has no international natural gas pipelines and relies on imports in the form of LNG, the natural gas has been traditionally procured by long term LNG contracts at relatively high price. Thus, there is a need of developing an Asian LNG trading hub, where LNG can be traded at more competitive spot prices. In a natural gas spot market, the amount of natural gas to be bought should be carefully determined considering a limited storage capacity and future pricing dynamics. In this work, the problem to find the optimal amount of natural gas in a spot market is formulated as a Markov decision process (MDP) in risk neutral environment and the optimal base stock policy which depends on a stage and price is established. Taking into account price and demand uncertainties, the basestock target levels are simply approximated from dynamic programming. The simulation results show that the basestock policy can be one of effective ways for procurement of LNG in a spot market.

• 무역학회지
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• 제47권5호
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• pp.289-304
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• 2022

Korea's LNG and crude oil are the most important energy and export raw materials, but 100% import resources by overseas. However, tanker shipping companies, which play the most crucial role in energy cargo security, are very small in number and size, which can be a factor in the supply chain crisis. Therefore, this paper studied the policy of expanding tanker transportation necessary for the transport of crude oil and LNG in Korea. In the existing literature, there was no policy study necessary for tanker ships, but referring only to the importance of overseas energy development and transportation, so we tried to derive various demands necessary for expanding the tanker fleet through expert interviews and AHP which was conducted on 89 related energy institutions to derive policies and their priorities. The results of the study are as follows. As for the policy, the financial support policy was the highest priority, followed by the business and the mutual cooperation policy of related agencies. Tax support (22.6%) and ship financing (19.4%) were the highest priorities, followed by the Energy Intermediate Promotion Act (11.9%), Tanker Guarantee Insurance (10.6%), Energy Budget Independence (9.3%), and Korea Trader Development (8.2%). Energy governance (6.3%), information center establishment (6.2%), and energy procurement committee (5.5%) ranked seventh, eighth, and ninth. The research results show that it is necessary to supply sufficient ships to the market through the expansion of ship finance for tankers and to follow business support policies such as guarantee insurance. In addition, it was also possible to derive that the financial resources need to be determined by law and independent budgets for consistency and continuity.