NATURAL GAS SUPPLY CHAIN: A SYSTEM AND PERFORMANCE ORIENTED APPROACH

Global energy consumption has been increasing in recent years. Among the main global energy sources, natural gas stands out. It presents benefits from diverse points of view, low emissions for the environment, low price for the consumers, lower cost and simplicity in the supply. That is why, within the global policies of emission reduction, natural gas is considered the source of transition energy between fossil fuels and clean, renewable and sustainable sources of energy. Considering that natural gas is a non-renewable resource, it presents a significant and progressive reduction in reserves in some regions worldwide, but with ample possibilities for the discovery of new reserves and transport from regions with greater availability of this resource. This reduction is not different to the Colombian case, where there has even been a reduction in the national production in contrast to the accelerated increase in demand from the various consumer sectors, which exposes the nation to a situation of shortages of this resource in the next years, this being even more critical, since power generation in Colombia highly depends on hydroelectricity, making natural gas to emerge as an attractive backup energy production of electricity through thermoelectric generation, in the occurrence of climatic phenomena of drought and decrease in river levels. Research carried out regarding the supply of natural gas in some regions of the world and even in Colombia, account for the analysis of elements such as price, environmental impact, reliability and essentially using optimization model, but nevertheless, these investigations do not consider the integration of both public and private actors from the perspective of Supply Chain Management (SCM), which affects the overall performance and results achieved by the system. In the supply of natural gas in Colombia, various actors intervene to extract, produce and transport, which interact to guarantee the supply of the resource. Therefore, by framing these actors according to an integrated perspective and analysing the outcomes of public policies through the use of dynamic simulation models, it is possible to identify which of these policies may produce the greatest impact in the future in terms of generating the necessary capacity and reliability in the supply, that is useful for stakeholders and decision makers. In this dissertation, the supply of natural gas for the Colombian case is studied, with a focus on the analysis of the integration and interaction of the actors involved in its Supply Chain Management, considering the necessary policies that guarantee the reliability of the national system, through models that combine Systems Dynamics Simulation (SD) and Dynamic Performance Management (DPM). As emerged by the analysis of the prevailing literature, the foregoing seeking to contribute to the research on managing natural gas supply through dynamic models has not been exhaustively addressed in previous research. This thesis is formed by three chapters containing each a research article. The first chapter analyses in depth previous research regarding natural gas supply and the use of systems dynamics, then, it presents a scenarios analysis to study the effect of variables such as percentage of reliability and time of generation of capacity in transportation of natural gas supply. This allows decision makers to establish priorities in the allocation of resources for the implementation of infrastructure projects. In the second chapter, more entities are involved in the supply chain of natural gas, such as reserves, production, transport and demand, and an analysis of the effect of the price at the mouth of the well on the supply and demand of production and the price to the consumer on the supply and demand of transport is carried out. Such an analysis enables the identification of stabilization values for these prices and the levels of capacity in construction and existing one by the actors with respect to the natural gas demand projections. Eventually, in the third chapter, based on the findings of the previous chapters, the Dynamic Performance Management (DPM) methodology is applied to evaluate the impact of public policies aimed at enhancing reliability and the development of necessary capacity in the actors of the chain of natural gas supply, guaranteeing the uninterrupted provision of this resource.