Estudio y diseño de un régimen fiscal que optimice la inversión en exploración y producción de hidrocarburos

Los regímenes fiscales que se aplican a los contratos de exploración y desarrollo de petróleo y gas, entre los propietarios del recurso natural (generalmente el país soberano representado por su gobierno) y las compañías operadoras internacionales (COI) que aportan capital, experiencia y tecnología, no han sabido responder a la reciente escalada de los precios del crudo y han dado lugar a que los países productores no estén recibiendo la parte de renta correspondiente al incremento de precios. Esto ha provocado una ola de renegociaciones llegándose incluso a la imposición unilateral de nuevos términos por parte de algunos gobiernos entre los que destacan el caso de Venezuela y Argentina, por ser los más radicales. El objetivo del presente trabajo es el estudio y diseño de un régimen fiscal que, en las actuales condiciones del mercado, consiga que los gobiernos optimicen sus ingresos incentivando la inversión. Para ello se simulan los efectos de siete tipos diferentes de fiscalidades aplicadas a dos yacimientos de características muy distintas y se valoran los resultados. El modelo utilizado para la simulación es el modelo de escenarios, ampliamente utilizado tanto por la comunidad académica como por la industria para comparar el comportamiento de diferentes regímenes fiscales. Para decidir cuál de las fiscalidades estudiadas es la mejor se emplea un método optimización multicriterio. Los criterios que se han aplicado para valorar los resultados recogen la opinión de expertos de la industria sobre qué factores se consideran deseables en un contrato a la hora invertir. El resultado permite delinear las características de un marco fiscal ideal del tipo acuerdo de producción compartida, sin royalties, con un límite alto de recuperación de crudo coste que permita recobrar todos los costes operativos y una parte de los de capital en cualquier escenario de precios, un reparto de los beneficios en función de un indicador de rentabilidad como es la TIR, con un mecanismo de recuperación de costes adicional (uplift) que incentive la inversión y con disposiciones que premien la exploración y más la de alto riesgo como la amortización acelerada de los gastos de capital o una ampliación de la cláusula de ringfence. Un contrato con estas características permitirá al gobierno optimizar los ingresos obtenidos de sus reservas de petróleo y gas maximizando la producción al atraer inversión para la exploración y mejorar la recuperación alargando la vida del yacimiento. Además al reducir el riesgo percibido por el inversor que recupera sus costes, menor será la rentabilidad exigida al capital invertido y por tanto mayor la parte de esos ingresos que irá a parar al gobierno del país productor. ABSTRACT Fiscal systems used in petroleum arrangements between the owners of the resource (usually a sovereign country represented by its government) and the international operating company (IOC) that provides capital, knowhow and technology, have failed to allocate profits from the recent escalation of oil prices and have resulted in producing countries not receiving the right share of that increase. This has caused a wave of renegotiations and even in some cases, like Venezuela and Argentina, government unilaterally imposed new terms. This paper aims to outline desirable features of a petroleum fiscal system, under current market conditions, for governments to maximize their revenues while encouraging investment. Firstly the impact of seven different types of fiscal regimes is studied with a simulation for two separate oil fields using the scenario approach. The scenario approach has been frequently employed by academic and business researchers to compare the performance of diverse fiscal regimes. In order to decide which of the fiscal regimes’ performance is best we used a multi-objective optimization decision making approach to assess the results. The criteria applied gather the preferences of a panel of industry experts about the desirable features of a contract when making investment decisions. The results show the characteristics of an ideal fiscal framework that closely resembles a production sharing contract, with no royalty payment and a high cost recovery limit that allows the IOC to recover all operating expenses and a share of its capital costs under any price scenario, a profit oil sharing mechanism based on a profitability indicator such as the ROR, with an uplift that allows to recover an additional percentage of capital costs and provisions that promote exploration investment, specially high-risk exploration, such as accelerated depreciation for capital costs and a wide definition of the ringfence clause. A contract with these features will allow governments to optimize overall revenues from its petroleum resources maximizing production by promoting investment on exploration and extending oil fields life. Also by reducing the investor’s perception of risk it will reduce the minimum return to capital required by the IOC and therefore it will increase the government share of those revenues.

Agreement Abstractions in Anonymous and Homonymous Distributed Systems Prone to Failures

The distributed computing models typically assume every process in the system has a distinct identifier (ID) or each process is programmed differently, which is named as eponymous system. In such kind of distributed systems, the unique ID is helpful to solve problems: it can be incorporated into messages to make them trackable (i.e., to or from which process they are sent) to facilitate the message transmission; several problems (leader election, consensus, etc.) can be solved without the information of network property in priori if processes have unique IDs; messages in the register of one process will not be overwritten by others process if this process announces; it is useful to break the symmetry. Hence, eponymous systems have influenced the distributed computing community significantly either in theory or in practice. However, every thing in the world has its own two sides. The unique ID also has disadvantages: it can leak information of the network(size); processes in the system have no privacy; assign unique ID is costly in bulk-production(e.g, sensors). Hence, homonymous system is appeared. If some processes share the same ID and programmed identically is called homonymous system. Furthermore, if all processes shared the same ID or have no ID is named as anonymous system. In homonymous or anonymous distributed systems, the symmetry problem (i.e., how to distinguish messages sent from which process) is the main obstacle in the design of algorithms. This thesis is aimed to propose different symmetry break methods (e.g., random function, counting technique, etc.) to solve agreement problem. Agreement is a fundamental problem in distributed computing including a family of abstractions. In this thesis, we mainly focus on the design of consensus, set agreement, broadcast algorithms in anonymous and homonymous distributed systems. Firstly, the fault-tolerant broadcast abstraction is studied in anonymous systems with reliable or fair lossy communication channels separately. Two classes of anonymous failure detectors AΘ and AP∗ are proposed, and both of them together with a already proposed failure detector ψ are implemented and used to enrich the system model to implement broadcast abstraction. Then, in the study of the consensus abstraction, it is proved the AΩ′ failure detector class is strictly weaker than AΩ and AΩ′ is implementable. The first implementation of consensus in anonymous asynchronous distributed systems augmented with AΩ′ and where a majority of processes does not crash. Finally, a general consensus problem– k-set agreement is researched and the weakest failure detector L used to solve it, in asynchronous message passing systems where processes may crash and recover, with homonyms (i.e., processes may have equal identities), and without a complete initial knowledge of the membership.

Agreement Abstractions in Anonymous and Homonymous Distributed Systems Prone to Failures

The distributed computing models typically assume every process in the system has a distinct identifier (ID) or each process is programmed differently, which is named as eponymous system. In such kind of distributed systems, the unique ID is helpful to solve problems: it can be incorporated into messages to make them trackable (i.e., to or from which process they are sent) to facilitate the message transmission; several problems (leader election, consensus, etc.) can be solved without the information of network property in priori if processes have unique IDs; messages in the register of one process will not be overwritten by others process if this process announces; it is useful to break the symmetry. Hence, eponymous systems have influenced the distributed computing community significantly either in theory or in practice. However, every thing in the world has its own two sides. The unique ID also has disadvantages: it can leak information of the network(size); processes in the system have no privacy; assign unique ID is costly in bulk-production(e.g, sensors). Hence, homonymous system is appeared. If some processes share the same ID and programmed identically is called homonymous system. Furthermore, if all processes shared the same ID or have no ID is named as anonymous system. In homonymous or anonymous distributed systems, the symmetry problem (i.e., how to distinguish messages sent from which process) is the main obstacle in the design of algorithms. This thesis is aimed to propose different symmetry break methods (e.g., random function, counting technique, etc.) to solve agreement problem. Agreement is a fundamental problem in distributed computing including a family of abstractions. In this thesis, we mainly focus on the design of consensus, set agreement, broadcast algorithms in anonymous and homonymous distributed systems. Firstly, the fault-tolerant broadcast abstraction is studied in anonymous systems with reliable or fair lossy communication channels separately. Two classes of anonymous failure detectors AΘ and AP∗ are proposed, and both of them together with a already proposed failure detector ψ are implemented and used to enrich the system model to implement broadcast abstraction. Then, in the study of the consensus abstraction, it is proved the AΩ′ failure detector class is strictly weaker than AΩ and AΩ′ is implementable. The first implementation of consensus in anonymous asynchronous distributed systems augmented with AΩ′ and where a majority of processes does not crash. Finally, a general consensus problem– k-set agreement is researched and the weakest failure detector L used to solve it, in asynchronous message passing systems where processes may crash and recover, with homonyms (i.e., processes may have equal identities), and without a complete initial knowledge of the membership.