U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI)

• Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM): Assessment of BOEM’s cost recoverable activities and development of updated fees.
• Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE): Economic analysis and evaluation of regulatory initiatives, including (1) oil and gas production safety systems regulations, (2) blowout preventer (BOP) and well control regulations, and (3) exploratory drilling on the Arctic OCS.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

• Modeling safety and aggregate economic benefits of nautical charts

U.S. Department of Transportation, Maritime Administration (MARAD)

• Development of economic models to help with the determination of fair and reasonable ocean freights for U.S. flagged vessels carrying non-382 cargo.
• Evaluation of the Maritime Security Program’s impact on the U.S. marine transportation industry and its ability to supply sealift capacity to the U.S. Department of Defense during times of national emergency or war.

U.S. Coast Guard (USCG)

• Facilitated formalized risk assessment workshops (i.e., Ports and Waterways Safety Assessment (PAWSA)) to identify risks to safe navigation in the ports/waterways of Corpus Christi, TX, and Los Angeles/Long Beach, CA.
• Conducted a cost-effectiveness analysis of third-party organizations (TPOs) used to ensure regulatory compliance with USCG standards.
• Helped update valuations of injuries on passenger vessels by analyzing data on maritime passenger injuries in USCG’s Marine Information for Safety and Law Enforcement (MISLE) database.
• Developed simulation models to estimate the economic costs of delays associated with prospective inland and deepwater port closures.
• Conducted an in-depth market study of the oil spill removal services industry.

Our staff has analyzed a wide range of topics including;

• Economic costs of port closures.
• Port competitiveness.
• Ocean freight rates.
• Maritime risk and incident assessments.
• Enforcement and compliance.
• Commodity flow projections for inland waterways.
• Economic impacts of inland port expansions.
• Competition between rail and barge.
• Clean Water Act requirements.
• Oil spill response organizations.
• Economic costs of oil spills.
• Assessment of the returns to beach nourishment investments.
• Validation of hurricane damage assessment models.
• Economic disaster recovery planning.
• Regulatory compliance (National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), Oil Pollution Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act, Coastal Zone Management Act, Ocean Dumping Act).

Research in these areas intersect with projects our staff has conducted in the transportation and energy sectors, where we have developed rates of return on transportation investments, developed gravity models, designed and implemented origin–destination (O–D) surveys, estimated the impacts of infrastructure investments on productivity, developed models to calculate the economic impacts of oil exploration and development scenarios on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), and assessed the safety and environmental impact of regulations on offshore energy development.