Natural gas crisis, system resilience and emergency responses: A China case

The recent Russia-Ukraine war has reignited the world's biggest energy crisis in decades. As an important pillar of energy security, system resilience has attracted much attention. Previous research has focused on conception, composition and measurement. Few captured the dynamic features of resilience process of energy systems. In this paper, an input-output nested system dynamics (IO-SD) model is proposed to study the resilience of natural gas systems in a crisis. As a special feature, the model captures both inter-sectoral linkages and dynamic transmission of the crisis. The study highlighted and analyzed the role of emergency measures such as the release of stockpiles and emergency supplies. Later, the resilience performance of China gas system in 2017-crisis was examined in various aspects, e.g., economic loss and efficiency of emergency measures. We find that strategic storage could be beneficial to the resilience of NG systems. But expanding the storage size in isolation is not enough. Two key measures to enhance the resilience of the system are: (1) increasing the flexibility and operational efficiency of emergency facilities, e.g., storage releasing capability and gasification efficiency; and (2) building efficient infrastructure and services, enhancing connectivity of storage infrastructure and supply networks, and removing bottlenecks in regional interconnection.