I think what you might be more interested in is what our present capabilities are. I get involved in a number of subjects relating to the upstate petroleum industry economics. We have a well-developed expertise in the financial modeling of petroleum industry investments, of the exploration and pre-development stage. Those were our original skills and we have kept that up to date. We have the capability of undertaking studies of the impact of all kinds of royalties, taxation, production-sharing agreements on investments; seeing it from the investor's point of view, from the government's point of view. We have good techniques developed for analyzing the risks involved in the petroleum. We have done a lot of advisory work on the design of petroleum licensing arrangements and contracts. That is an area where I have done a lot of work personally. In the last few years, we have done quite a lot in the Former Soviet Union countries: Russia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. We did a big study for the government of Australia recently.

We have developed some software products for analyzing the effects of taxation. That is another outgrowth of our expertise in financial modeling. We have done quite a bit of training in petroleum economics. In the last few years we have done quite a bit for the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Energy of Russia and we have also done it for the government of Kazakhstan, and various others. For Azerbaijan, we went out and did a course in Azerbaijan actually. We sometimes do market studies of the market for particular products, quite narrow kinds of studies, for example, helicopter market in the offshore oil industry. We have developed a large suite of financial models that have incorporated all the royalty, taxation and production-sharing arrangements for a lot of countries. These are examples of the countries we currently have models for. In Europe, UK, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, Ireland will be used quite a lot. In Africa, Nigeria, Egypt, Mozambique, and Tanzania. In Asia, we always model Malaysia and Indonesia, China and Australia in particular. And in North America, Alaska, we have done several studies for the government of Alaska, and especially offshore, the Gulf of Mexico. In other countries, we have production-sharing contract arrangement, for example Azerbaijan, but we have also modeled Sakhalin-I and Sakhalin-II production-sharing contract terms. In the study we did early this year for the government of Australia in Canberra; we investigated how competitive their taxation system for deep-water was, compared to some other countries. We were asked to compare Indonesia and China. We are just finishing a big study for the Ministry of Finance (MOF) in Moscow. This is a very detailed study of how the petroleum taxation system of Russia could be reformed. We are also delivering a financial model that would enable the MOF to project the revenues they could expect from the oil industry. That has been a big piece of work that has involved a lot of model development.

Here is some elaboration on some of the projects. The Faroe Islands are northwest of Scotland. They are going to have a license sometime this year; we have done a lot of work on the royalty and taxation system for them. We have done forecasting work quite a few times on the UK Continental Shelf to forecast the level of activity and what the investment levels will be, what the production expenditures will be, what the main sector of the economy would be that would benefit from the oil companies. In petroleum economics training, we have done that several times, and I am about to go to Baku; just a year ago I was in Baku where we did a training course for the Azeri employees of the Azerbaijan Financial Operating Company which is the big consortium of Western companies.

In the North Sea, quite a big topic is alliancing and partnering between the oil companies and their contractors, and there are some complicated contract arrangements about sharing the risks under the board. We have done several studies on that back in 1996. We are still doing some studies. In fact, I have published some academic papers on that subject as well. Decommissioning, yes, we have done several studies on decommissioning and mothballing. One company asked us to look at the effects of mothballing an oil platform for some time. Transco is the company of British Gas, which has the big pipeline system. It is a monopoly, so their targets are regulated; we were asked to look at the effects of their targeting policy on the viability of multiple fields in the North Sea. That was for the local regional government here.

Here are some more examples going back a year or two. The tragedy of 1988, one platform exploded and 167 people were killed. There have been a lot of studies on regulations with respect to safety ever since then. At the moment we are doing another one and that one is in progress. There is some as well on the regulations working, and also, there is some on what are the costs of complying with the very tough safety regulations we have now.

We collaborate quite a bit. Obviously, I am involved with the Department of Economics but also with the Department of Safety Engineering, also we have a lot of collaboration with the Management Department, and to some extent with the Psychology Department, there is the safety expert there, and also with local governments. Scottish Enterprise is the development agency and we collaborate a lot with them; their oil and energy group. The UK Know-how Fund is the British government's aid agency for outside know-how to FSU countries. We collaborate with them. We also collaborate with the World Bank. We are a subsidiary company of the university's industrial services. It belongs 100 percent to the university. We have a lot of directors of which I am one. We have the petroleum economics group, my colleague in charge of that one is in Moscow. We have an administration group, and we have a programmers group because so much of our work requires highly skilled programming. That is really all I propose to say.