Anna Agarwal is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and is also pursuing a M.S. in the Technology and Policy Program. Her research focus is on risk management and the commercial structuring of the CCS (carbon capture and storage) value chain.
Her current work involves looking at questions such as who bears the different risks in different parts of the CCS value chain, and how alternate commercial structures such as contracts can be used to efficiently manage the various risks and the potential liabilities along the value chain. This research is a part of MIT’s Energy Conversion Project which is funded by BP.
She is also interested in the energy policy challenges in developing countries, and is involved in a project with the MIT School of Engineering that focuses on rural electrification in India.
Devin Helfrich is a first year Master’s candidate in the Technology and Policy Program.
He is currently working on a project funded by the Energy and Financial Markets Initiative at the US Energy Information Administration. The goal of the project is to map out how exposure to oil price risk is channeled through the economy, from resource owners to producers to investors. He is identifying contractual exposures, and financial structures such as royalty trusts, as well as hedges using futures contracts, swaps and other derivatives.
(October 2011)