Quantitative assessment of energy supply security: Korea case study

Abstract

Ensuring energy supply security has become one of the most important purposes for many countries. To make the strategies for ensuring the energy supply security of a country, it is essential to quantitatively assess the security. This paper aims to present a methodology to evaluate the energy supply security of a country by using different indices of energy dependence and energy diversity, which have been raised as two main paradigms of energy supply security. This study also proposes two indices reflecting the correlation between a country’s energy diversity and energy import dependence to evaluate its energy supply security based on easily accessible data. The presented methodology and indices were applied to the evaluation of the primary energy supply security of Korea from 1991 to 2018. The results show that a country highly dependent on energy imports is not evaluated as secure enough in terms of energy supply even if it obtains higher energy diversity. This finding supports the importance of the correlation of energy dependence and energy diversity of a country to ensure its energy supply security. This approach could be further adapted to other countries and help them to make their energy policy and strategies.