Research

2023 Minerva Defense Education and Civilian University Partnership Award

ABSTRACT:

The clean energy transition will be minerals and metals intensive. Currently, supply chains are overwhelmingly reliant on imports from China. Given rising geo-strategic tensions between the United States and China, that dependence has potentially troubling implications for U.S. national security. In order to understand whether and how such dependence might create national security risks requires an exploration into the nature and extent of likely future demand for and supplies of raw materials and intermediate inputs as the scope and scale of demand for batteries and other inputs increase. Further, although metals and minerals have different properties from liquid fuels, they potentially can be employed as coercive foreign policy tools. The control of energy supplies was the basis for the 1973 oil crisis and is causing significant global shifts as a result of Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Such an effort with minerals and metals, if it were to be employed by the PRC, could potentially cause significant disruption to Western economies and national security.

The project, what we term “Minerals, Batteries, and Clean Energy” (MB-CE), aims to interrogate more fully foundational social science questions, particularly important since the U.S. has costly plans to diversify its supply chains for these materials. These diversification plans could raise the costs associated with the clean energy transition and will require significant transformations in trade and alliance patterns. The MB-CE project will use two expert roundtable convenings to collect state-of-the-art social science-informed approaches to modeling and understanding these questions.

The core contribution of MB-CE to social science will be surfacing best practices in understanding and modeling this dynamic decision space, identifying critical gaps and potential paths forward for overcoming them at the intersection of technology, society, and security. The implications for national security are a more robust analytical basis for decision-making. Given the stakes, including revived geo-strategic competition with China as well as a re-orientation of the U.S. national economy to revive manufacturing, an examination of the foundations for the emergent turn to diversification of supply chains and on-shoring and ally-shoring of supply is important and necessary.

Book Project

ABSTRACT:

Energy security is crucially important for states because it sits at the juncture of security and economic development. Fundamental realpolitik would lead us to expect all energy insecure states to pursue energy security as a first priority, but in fact many states that are highly dependent on energy supplies from another producer state do not do so. The oil crisis of the 1970s fundamentally transformed US foreign policy, yet despite two major crises in the span of three years Ukraine did not reduce its substantial dependence on Russian energy supplies. In the wake of both crises Ukraine actually increased its already substantial dependence on Russian energy supplies through a series of unfavorable contracts. What explains variation in the outcomes of energy security in energy dependent states?

The first part of my dissertation demonstrates a wide variety of energy security outcomes throughout Europe despite geographic and historical similarities. My novel theory argues that outcomes of energy security and the international energy trade are driven by domestic level political capture that underlies market transactions in certain states. I demonstrate that the main determinant of energy supply diversification is instead the choice of property rights regime in the consumer state.

To develop and test this argument I collected and coded an original dataset of energy dependence over time, which includes information that has not been systematically examined in International Relations or Economics scholarship, on the basis of extensive field research and a new conceptualization of “energy security.” During fieldwork conducted over 18 months in Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Russia and Ukraine that included developing personal connections, over 300 interviews and archival work, I gathered data on a variety of factors including long-term natural gas contracts (LTCs), the majority of which is published here for the first time. Using quantitative analysis, I demonstrate empirically that when states fail to enforce rule of law property rights regimes, the likelihood of a radical transformation of its energy policy is low. I examine the mechanisms of my model through qualitative case studies in the cases of Ukraine, Lithuania and Hungary.