• Korean Journal of Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Engineering
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.232-242
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• 2005

It has been recognized that solar water heating systems are economically inferior to conventional gas water-heaters and boilers using light oil as fuel in spite of having practical possibilities among other alternative energy facilities in Korea. The solar system, however, should be revaluated due to the sharp rise of oil prices recently. We have calculated the energy amount and cost through a series of research projects for the system by experiment and simulation, which lead to analyzing reliable life cycle costs. For the economic analysis, the gas water-heater and light oil boiler were taken as base cases while the solar systems implemented with these facilities were compared as alternatives. As a result, the solar system using the light oil as an auxiliary fuel surpassed the light oil boiler in economics. And a $50\%$ government subsidy for the initial cost is needed to maintain competitiveness with the gas hot-water heater. With this support, the simple payback period of the system can approach 12.8 years under $20\%$ additional curtailment of expenditure.

• Applied Chemistry for Engineering
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• v.27 no.4
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• pp.343-352
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• 2016

It has been estimated that the Earth has nearly 1.688 trillion barrels of crude oil, which will last 53.3 years at current extraction rates. The organization of petroleum exporting countries (OPEC) group forecasted that the oil prices will not jump to triple-digit territory within a decade, but it can quickly increase as the political issue for reducing oil production appears. With the potential of serious shortage of conventional hydrocarbon resources, the heavy oil, one of unconventional hydrocarbon resources including oil sand and natural bitumen has attracted worldwide interest. The heavy oil contains heavy hydrocarbon compounds, commonly called as resins and asphaltenes, with long carbon chains more than sixty carbon atoms. The high content of heavier fraction corresponds with the high molecular weight, viscosity, and boiling point. Physicochemical properties of residues from vacuum distillation of conventional oil, referred to as vacuum residues (VR) were similar to those of heavy oil. For the development of heavy oil reserves, reducing the heavy oil viscosity is the most important. In this article, commercially employed aquathermolysis processes and their application to VR upgrading are discussed. VR contains transition metals such as Ni and V, but these metals should be eliminated in advance for further refining. Recent studies on demetallization technologies for VR are also reviewed.

• Journal of Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers
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• v.39 no.1
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• pp.30-45
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• 2013

Predicting monthly electricity price has been a significant factor of decision-making for plant resource management, fuel purchase plan, plans to plant, operating plan budget, and so on. In this paper, we propose a sophisticated prediction model in terms of the technique of modeling and the variety of the collected variables. The proposed model hybridizes the semi-supervised learning and the artificial neural network algorithms. The former is the most recent and a spotlighted algorithm in data mining and machine learning fields, and the latter is known as one of the well-established algorithms in the fields. Diverse economic/financial indexes such as the crude oil prices, LNG prices, exchange rates, composite indexes of representative global stock markets, etc. are collected and used for the semi-supervised learning which predicts the up-down movement of the price. Whereas various climatic indexes such as temperature, rainfall, sunlight, air pressure, etc, are used for the artificial neural network which predicts the real-values of the price. The resulting values are hybridized in the proposed model. The excellency of the model was empirically verified with the monthly data of electricity price provided by the Korea Energy Economics Institute.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.149-156
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• 2020

The study aims to investigate a close relation between macro and non-macro variables on stock performance of tourism companies in Korea. The sample used in this study includes monthly data from January 2001 to December 2018. The stock price index of the tourism companies as a dependent variable are obtained from Sejoong, HanaTour, and RedcapTour as three leading Korean tourism companies that have been listed on the Korea Stock Exchange. This study assesses the tourism stock performance using the quantile regression approach. This study also investigates whether global crisis events as the Iraq War and the global financial crisis as non-macro variables have a significant effect on the stock performance of tourism companies in Korea. The results show that the oil prices, exchange rate and industrial production have negative coefficients on stock prices of tourism companies, while the effects of tourist expenditure and consumer price index are positive and significant. We estimate the result of quantile regression that non-macro determinants have statistically a significant and negative effect on tourism stock performance because the global crisis could threaten traveler's safety and economy. Overall, empirical results suggest that the effects of macro and non-macro variables are statistically asymmetric and highly related to tourism stock performance.

• Environmental and Resource Economics Review
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.763-779
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• 2007

The combined heat-and-power (CHP) plant is recently suggested as an effective resolution in response to recent rising oil prices and the Kyoto Protocol. This research provides a model for economic appraisal to evaluate CHP investment. Real option model is developed to incorporate a case where the investment is irreversible and underlying revenue is stochastic. The analysis shows that power plant capacity more than 40 Gcal makes CHP investment profitable while the results may vary 10 modest level with respect to investment cost, heat sales price and discount rate.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.8 no.8
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• pp.297-309
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• 2021

In this study, to capture the skewness and kurtosis detected in both conditional and unconditional return distributions of the stock markets of Kazakhstan and Russia, two versions of normal mixture GARCH models are employed. The data set consists of daily observations of the Kazakhstan and Russia stock prices, and world crude oil price, covering the period from 1 June 2006 through 1 March 2021. From the empirical results, incorporating the long memory effect on the returns not only provides better descriptions of dynamic behaviors of the stock market prices but also plays a significant role in improving a better understanding of the return dynamics. In addition, normal mixture models for time-varying volatility provide a better fit to the conditional densities than the usual GARCH specifications and has an important advantage that the conditional higher moments are time-varying. This implies that the volatility skews implied by normal mixture models are more likely to exhibit the features of risk and the direction of the information flow is regime-dependent. The findings of this study contain useful information for diverse purposes of cross-border stock market players such as asset allocation, portfolio management, risk management, and market regulations.

• Communications for Statistical Applications and Methods
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.85-101
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• 2022

Derivative-linked securities (DLS) is a type of derivatives that offer an agreed return when the underlying asset price moves within a specified range by the maturity date. The underlying assets of DLS are diverse such as interest rates, exchange rates, crude oil, or gold. A German 10-year bond rate-linked DLS and a USD-GBP CMS rate-linked DLS have recently become a social issue in Korea due to a huge loss to investors. In this regard, this paper accounts for the payoff structure of these products and evaluates their prices and fair coupon rates as well as risk measures such as Value-at-Risk (VaR) and Tail-Value-at-Risk (TVaR). We would like to examine how risky these products were and whether or not their coupon rates were appropriate. We use Hull-White Model as the stochastic model for the underlying assets and Monte Carlo (MC) methods to obtain numerical results. The no-arbitrage prices of the German 10-year bond rate-linked DLS and the USD-GBP CMS rate-linked DLS at the center of the social issue turned out to be 0.9662% and 0.9355% of the original investment, respectively. Considering that Korea government bond rate for 2018 is about 2%, these values are quite low. The fair coupon rates that make the prices of DLS equal to the original investment are computed as 4.76% for the German 10-year bond rate-linked DLS and 7% for the USD-GBP CMS rate-linked DLS. Their actual coupon rates were 1.4% and 3.5%. The 95% VaR and TVaR of the loss for German 10-year bond rate-linked DLS are 37.30% and 64.45%, and those of the loss for USD-GBP CMS rate-linked DLS are 73.98% and 87.43% of the initial investment. Summing up the numerical results obtained, we could see that the DLS products of our interest were indeed quite unfavorable to individual investors.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.159-164
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• 2024

The domestic petroleum market is highly sensitive to changes in international oil prices. So, it is important to identify and respond to those changes. In particular, it is necessary to clearly understand the factors causing the price fluctuations of gasoline, which exhibits high consumption. International gasoline prices are influenced by global factors such as gasoline supplies, geopolitical events, and fluctuations in the U.S. dollar. However, previous studies have only focused on gasoline supplies. In this study, we explore the causal relationship between economic indicators and international gasoline prices using various machine learning-based regression models. First, we collect data on various global economic indicators. Second, we perform data preprocessing. Third, we model using Multiple linear regression, Ridge regression, and Lasso(Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator) regression. The multiple linear regression model showed the highest accuracy at 96.73% in test sets. As a result, Our Multiple linear regression model showed the highest accuracy at 96.73% in test sets. We will expect that our proposed model will be helpful for domestic economic stability and energy policy decisions.

• Environmental and Resource Economics Review
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.833-854
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• 2007

Output prices tend to respond faster to input price increases than to decreases. The 'rockets and feathers' hypothesis of asymmetric price behavior in petroleum market is tested by a full adjustment error correction model. Using monthly data for the period January 1977 to June 2006, evidence is found that there is a significant degree of asymmetry in the adjustment of wholesale prices to increases and to decreases in crude oil price. A similar hypothesis in regard to the exchange rate is also rejected by the data. Using weekly data over the period examined, evidence of asymmetry for gasoline, diesel and heating oil is also found in the transmission of price changes from wholesale to retail: retail prices increase more quickly in response to the wholesale price increases than to wholesale price decreases.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.38 no.4
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• pp.306-311
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• 2013

Purpose: With the ever-rising energy prices, thermal energy heavily consuming facilities of the agricultural sector such as commercialized greenhouses and large-scale Rice Processing Complexes (RPCs) need to cut down their energy cost if they must run profitable businesses continually. One possible way to reduce their energy cost is to utilize combustible agricultural by-products or low-price oil instead of light oil as the fuel for their boiler systems. This study aims to analyze the heavy oil combustion characteristics of a newly developed hot water boiler system that can use both rice husk and heavy oil as its fuel convertibly. Methods: Heavy oil combustion experiments were conducted in this study employing four fuel feed rates (7.6, 8.5, 9.5, 11.4 $l/h$) at a combustion furnace vacuum pressure of 500 Pa and with four combustion furnace vacuum pressures (375, 500, 625, 750 Pa) at fuel feed rates of 9.5 and 11.4 $l/h$. Temperatures at five locations inside the combustion furnace and 20 additional locations throughout the whole hot water boiler system were measured to ascertain the combustion characteristics of the heavy oil. From the temperature measurement data, the thermal efficiency of the system was calculated. Flue gas smoke density and concentrations of air-polluting components in the flue gas were also measured by a gas analyzer. Results: As the fuel feed rate or combustion furnace vacuum pressure increased, the average temperature in the combustion furnace decreased but the thermal efficiency of the system showed no distinctive change. On the other hand, the thermal efficiency of the system was inversely proportionally to the vacuum level in the furnace. For all experimental conditions, the thermal efficiency remained in the range of 80.1-89.6%. The CO concentration in the flue gas was negligibly low. The NO and $SO_2$ concentration as well as the smoke density met the legal requirements. Conclusions: Considering the combustion temperature characteristics, thermal efficiency, and flue gas composition, the optimal combustion condition of the system seemed to be either the fuel feed rate of 9.5 $l/h$ with a combustion furnace vacuum pressure of 375 Pa or a fuel feed rate of 11.4 $l/h$ with a furnace vacuum pressure between 500 Pa and 625 Pa.