The Repercussions of Being Addicted to Oil: Geospatial Modeling of Supply Shocks

In a world addicted to oil and the prodigious infrastructure that produces it there are distinct spatial variations in oil dependence and vulnerability. Depending on a country’s location, it will have dependencies of different sources of oil. Disruptions in any one source of oil will have differing impacts in both the magnitude and breadth of countries affected. To begin to understand such a volatile landscape this paper will review pertinent literature surrounding oil shocks and propose a model of how they can be geospatially modeled. Specifically the modeling will calculate an Oil Import Vulnerable Import Index, an Oil Dependency Index, and the percentage reduction in import diversity for 63 countries.