Case Study: Energy Industry Economic Impacts from Ohio River Transportation Disruption

Recent history is full of water transport disruption events that have had significant economic effects on the waterside industries. Such disruptions may be either natural or man-made disasters or planned outages on the river's lock and dam structures. To assess coal-based economic impacts for t...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Engineering economist Vol. 57; no. 2; pp. 77 - 100
Main Authors Güler, Çağlar Utku, Johnson, Alan W., Cooper, Martha
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Norcross Taylor & Francis Group 01.04.2012
Taylor & Francis Inc
Subjects
Coal-fired power plants
Economic impact
Network flow problem
Rivers
Studies
Transportation economics
United States > US
Ohio River
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:Recent history is full of water transport disruption events that have had significant economic effects on the waterside industries. Such disruptions may be either natural or man-made disasters or planned outages on the river's lock and dam structures. To assess coal-based economic impacts for the Ohio River Basin, we developed a network flow model to represent waterside coal-fired power plants situated along the Ohio River, their respective coal supplying mines, and the various transportation modes that connect them. We show that significant transportation-centric insights can be derived by using only commonly available spreadsheet-based analysis tools, open-source information systems, and web-based geographic tools.
ISSN:0013-791X
1547-2701
DOI:10.1080/0013791X.2012.677114