The Robustness of Natural Gas Energy Supply: System Dynamics Modelling

This article describes how affordability, acceptability, and reliability of energy supply are three important concerns for government. Due to the crude oil restrictions and its environmental impacts, a replacement of other energy sources has become more important in recent years. Natural gas is one of the replacements as a cleaner source with a more suitable calorific value than oil in comparison with other renewable energy sources. Therefore, utilization of natural gas as the main source of replacement strategies in the energy system has accelerated at the national level. However, the natural gas energy system is a complex system including different influencing and influenced variables that affect social and economic factors. This research has developed a system dynamics model to understand the complexity of the natural gas energy systems at the macro-level. The model shows the effective sub-systems of energy system with their related variables. It helps to predict the effective factors of an energy supply system based on statistics approaches. After that, three scenarios are defined based on expert opinions and the behaviors of the sub-systems in each scenario is analyzed. The approach also helps to understand unknown consequences of a decision or scenario in the energy system.