CalderBookSizeFrontMat

Korea’s Energy Insecurities

Comparative and

Regional Perspectives

Kent E. Calder

Korea Economic Institute

■

1201 F Street, NW, Suite 910

■

Washington, DC 20004

Telephone 202/464-1982

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Facsimile 202/464-1987

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Web address www.keia.org

The

Korea Economic Institute of America (KEI)

is registered under the

Foreign Agents Registration Act as an agent of the Korea Institute for
International Economic Policy, a public policy research foundation in Seoul
established by the government of the Republic of Korea. This material is filed
with the Department of Justice, where the required registration statement is
available for public inspection. Registration does not indicate U.S. govern-
ment approval of the contents of this document. KEI is not engaged in the
practice of law, does not render legal services, and is not a lobbying
organization.

The views expressed in this publication are those of the author and do

not necessarily reflect the views of individual members of KEI’s Board of
Directors or its Advisory Council.

KEI Editorial Board

Editor in Chief

James M. Lister

Contract Editor

Mary Marik

Assistant Editor

Florence M. Lowe-Lee

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Calder, Kent E.
Korea’s energy insecurities : comparative and regional perspectives /
Kent E. Calder.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-9747141-3-5
1. Energy policy--Korea (South) 2. Energy policy--Korea (North) 3.
Power resources--Korea (South) 4. Power resources--Korea (North) I.
Title.
HD9502.K82C35 2005
333.7909519--dc22
2005032101

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

South Korea’s Triple Energy-Security Dilemma

Asia’s Growth Deepens Korea’s Energy Insecurities

North Korea and the Northeast Asian Energy Equation 29

Seoul’s Energy Options for the Future

Conclusion

Reference List

About the Author

Foreword

The Korea Economic Institute (KEI) is pleased to issue the third vol-
ume in its Special Studies series. In contrast with KEI’s other publica-
tions, which generally take the form of compilations of relatively short
articles on analytical and policy issues by a number of authors, this se-
ries affords individual authors an opportunity to explore in depth a par-
ticular topic of current interest relating to Korea.

In this book, Dr. Kent Calder examines the actual and potential

sources of energy available to each of the two Koreas as well as present
and prospective policies to address the insecurities that each country
faces. He weaves together the complex political-security considerations
and the compelling laws of economics. This book is particularly timely
in light of the recent Declaration of Principles agreed at the fourth round
of the six-party talks.

KEI is dedicated to objective, informative analysis. We welcome

comments on this and our other publications. We seek to expand con-
tacts with academic and research organizations across the country and
welcome proposals for other Special Studies.

Joseph A. B. Winder

President

Korea Economic Institute

November 2005

Preface

Much has been said and written about the North Korean nuclear crisis
as well as how the world should deal with the DPRK itself. Energy lies
at the heart of virtually all policy approaches to the Korean peninsula’s
future—be they diplomatic, political-military, or economic in character.
Energy was central in the efforts to deal with the 1994 confrontation
between the United States and North Korea, and energy is a key element
in the ongoing six-party talks.

For all their policy importance, the details of Korea’s energy inse-

curities remain curiously opaque to general readers and even to most
political and economic decision makers as well. This monograph is a
modest effort to help fill that basic knowledge gap. I have been inter-
ested in the topic for years and have worked on Asian energy problems,
in both their economic and security dimensions, for more than a decade.
I am grateful to the Korea Economic Institute, especially President Jo-
seph Winder and Vice President James Lister, for suggesting a serious
study of the question and allowing total intellectual freedom as to how
to proceed, as well as supporting travel and research.

Many have helped make this project a reality over the many months

and, indeed, years that it has been in progress. Sincere thanks are due to
the Korea Foundation for its help in inspiring the author’s deep basic
interests in Korea’s political economy and its future. Seoul National
University’s Graduate School of International Studies provided a fruit-
ful research environment. Yukie Yoshikawa provided creative, insight-
ful, iconoclastic, and energetic research assistance without which this
project simply could not have been completed. Commentators Fereidun

Introduction

For more than a half century, the specter of renewed conflict across the
demilitarized zone (DMZ) has dominated thinking about Korea’s fu-
ture. To be sure, the prevailing political-military situation at the DMZ is
dangerous, periodic changes in diplomatic atmospherics notwithstand-
ing. Close to two million men remain under arms on the Korean penin-
sula, more than the standing armies of either the United States or the
former Soviet Union. A heavy share of those forces are still forward
deployed within 50 miles of Seoul and its 12 million civilians, across a
no-man’s-land never marked by a formal peace accord.

During the past 15 years, the North-South confrontation has been

transformed into a more complex and multifaceted security challenge.
In 1993 the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North
Korea) successfully launched No-dong mobile missiles into the East
Sea (Sea of Japan). And in 1998 the DPRK launched a multistage Taepo-
dong missile over Japan itself. Pyongyang also has extensive chemical,
biological, and nuclear weapons programs, as is well known. When North
Korea solves demanding technical problems impeding weaponization
of its nuclear devices and weapons delivery, it will have the credible
potential to seriously threaten both Japan and nations beyond.

Yet the political economy of the Korean peninsula, together with its

long-standing military confrontations, is rapidly changing—the North
Korean missile and nuclear crises notwithstanding. Economic growth
and technological change are relentlessly shifting the locus of power on
the peninsula south of the DMZ. Even amid dramatic, historic develop-
ments in the North Korean nuclear crisis, it is important now to think

Korea’s Energy Insecurities

beyond traditional security threats to broader, often neglected challenges
of the longer-term future.

Central Importance of Electric Power
on the Korean Peninsula

Energy and the uncertainties linked to its varied forms of supply may
loom disturbingly large on the Korean peninsula. One need look no fur-
ther than the specter of North Korean nuclear potential in the wake of
Pyongyang’s February 2005 declaration that it is a nuclear-weapons state
and the surrealistic contrast with the DPRK’s desperately broken elec-
tric power grid to grasp the interrelated security and economic impor-
tance of energy to the Korean peninsula’s future. Energy is inevitably a
central part of both the problem and the solution to the North Korean
nuclear crisis.

Energy is also an excellent vehicle for engaging the national inter-

ests of the United States with the healthy, stable evolution of both the
Korean peninsula and the whole of the Northeast Asian region. The se-
curity interests of the United States in forestalling the proliferation of
weapons of mass destruction have been well articulated. Also important
is an often neglected political-economic imperative: ways for U.S. en-
ergy firms and other U.S. private investors to become positively involved
in Northeast Asian development and to demonstrate concretely that such
involvement can translate into U.S. jobs and corporate opportunity. His-
torically, it has been diplomats, missionaries, and especially the military
that have dominated the U.S. presence on the Korean peninsula. More
business involvement—closer to the pattern of U.S.-China ties—could
well help draw the United States toward continental Northeast Asia in a
more enduring and balanced fashion than has often been true in the past.

Energy insecurities on both sides of the DMZ have long cast a trou-

bling shadow across Korea’s postwar economic development. In South
Korea (the Republic of Korea, or ROK), more than three decades of
sustained growth before the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis brought ris-
ing dependence on volatile international energy markets as the develop-
ment of a powerful national industrial base outstripped modest domes-
tic resource endowments. Both the oil shocks of the 1970s hit Korea
hard. Today, in the wake of the 1997–98 financial crisis, energy dilem-
mas universally implicit in rapid economic growth once again threaten
to reassert themselves in Korea, albeit this time more with respect to
electric power infrastructure than to oil. The fact that economic
growth has transcended Korea to include most of its neighbors—

Introduction

especially China—makes Korea’s deepening energy insecurities espe-
cially threatening.

The sharp differences in the energy economies of North and South

Korea are obvious—a few are income level, adequacy of infrastructure,
and access to international markets—and need not be belabored. This
monograph, therefore, starts from a more challenging, counter-intuitive,
and yet ever more policy-relevant contention: that Korea’s energy
economy needs to be seen as an analytical whole. Many of the peninsula’s
problems are common to the North as well as the South despite the
obvious need for contrasting short-term responses. And the shadows of
reunification are deepening.

North Korea shares the South’s fundamental problem of limited

natural-resource endowment. To be sure, in the North, lower growth as
well as the still substantial, if low-quality, local coal reserves have made
greater energy self-sufficiency possible. The economic backwardness
and political isolation of the North have temporarily bred a converse
problem: inadequate foreign exchange to procure needed energy im-
ports. Yet, accelerated growth, when it comes, will bring with it many of
the dilemmas that have plagued the South in past years.

Apart from an underlying lack of domestic oil reserves—coupled,

in the North’s case, with an inability to secure adequate imports—
another basic challenge unites the two Koreas: providing an adequate
electric power supply. For the North, the basic issue is twofold: the inef-
ficiency and obsolescence of its hydro and coal-fired electric power
generating capacity as well as a chronic lack of spare parts. Because of
such difficulties, 70 percent of the country’s entire power generation
capacity is either abandoned or in urgent need of repairs.

Added nuclear power capacity offers to Pyongyang the appealing,

if facile, prospect of one-stop energy independence. Despite a lack of
oil and gas reserves, and despite obsolete and decaying conventional
electric power generating facilities, North Korea believes that with
nuclear power it could potentially eliminate what has long been its
economic Achilles’ heel and do so in a fashion consistent with its under-
lying philosophy of self-reliance. The North’s persistent efforts of the
past 15 years to develop nuclear power are thus motivated by autarkic
impulses much broader and more complex than simply wanting to pos-

1. Figures are for 2003; see Ministry of Unification (Seoul), www.unikorea.

go.kr/en/.

Korea’s Energy Insecurities

sess nuclear weapons, although the North clearly seems to include a
persistent quest for nuclear weapons capability as well.

For South Korea, electric power also lies at the heart of its energy

equation, albeit in a different way. As indicated in

Figure 1.1,

electric

power demand has been rising steadily across South Korea since the
Asian financial crisis, even as transportation use of energy has stag-
nated. The rapid rise in electricity demand is the driver for South Korea’s
rising coal, nuclear, gas, and hydro use and also for the South’s growing
concern with energy infrastructure—North and South. In this sense, the
June 2005 ROK proposal to supply two gigawatts of power to North
Korea through construction of new power stations and the extension of
South Korea’s grid addresses an energy problem larger than just resolu-
tion of the North Korean nuclear crisis, and it needs to be evaluated in
those comprehensive terms. The proposal explicitly provides, of course,
for new power supply directly to the North, in roughly the amounts prom-
ised under the 1995 Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organiza-
tion (KEDO) agreement. Yet it does so through the construction of large
new power plants in the South that can help address the South’s deepen-
ing shortage of electric power capacity as well. This innovative plan,
addressing as it does the energy dilemmas of both North and South from

10,000

20,000

30,000

40,000

50,000

For transportation

For electric generation

2003

1998

1993

1988

1983

TOE

Figure 1.1:

Electricity Demand in South Korea, 1981–2003, in

tons of oil equivalent (TOE)

Source: KEEI (various years).

Introduction

an integrated perspective, may well have defects of design, but its inte-
grated approach will likely be emulated in future years.

Korea’s Energy Insecurities in an International Context

Korea’s pronounced energy insecurities, both North and South, can use-
fully be viewed in an international context that clearly compounds those
vulnerabilities. Like Japan, Taiwan, and mainland China’s coastal prov-
inces, Korea as a whole lacks domestic oil and natural gas reserves. Yet
South Korea, in particular, has a remarkably high level of energy con-
sumption. Although only the world’s 26th-largest country in population
and 11th in gross domestic product (GDP), South Korea was 10th glo-
bally in primary energy consumption during 2002, 7th in oil usage, and
5th in crude oil imports.

It has subsequently become the world’s 4th-

largest oil importer.

Oil demand may well be slowing in the ROK as the transportation

market matures, as industrial consumers economize, and as electric power
providers shift to natural gas and nuclear power. Overall, South Korean
energy demand will continue to rise, fueling a deepening of Korea’s
energy insecurities. The Korean Energy Economics Institute projects
the growth of primary energy demand in the ROK at between 2.5 and
3.3 percent during the 2004–09 period (KEEI 2005). Practically any
positive economic development in the North would accelerate that de-
mand growth still further.

Korea must supply its rapidly rising thirst for energy in what is

arguably the most competitive energy neighborhood in the world. One
neighbor, Japan, has been the largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) im-
porter and the second-largest oil importer on Earth. And next-door China
alone accounted for more than one-third of world oil-demand growth
during 2000–04. In tight global markets, Korea’s energy-security tasks
are indeed sobering in their scale, scope, and intensity.

2. For population, see DOE (2003); for gross domestic product (GDP), see

World Bank (2005); and for energy consumption, see BP (2005).

South Korea’s

Triple Energy-Security Dilemma

South Korea confronts some of the most severe energy-security dilem-
mas in the world, and these dilemmas form an unusual triad combina-
tion, intensifying the challenge that they present to the country’s eco-
nomic future: Most fundamentally, Korea lacks domestic sources of
energy to fuel its remarkable, rapidly growing, and energy-intensive
economy. To make matters worse, it is unusually dependent on oil as a
fuel source. In addition, most of Korea’s oil, together with much of its
natural gas, comes from the volatile Middle East.

The most basic, underlying problem is that Korea’s rising energy

demand confronts an extremely limited domestic resource base. With
large steel, shipbuilding, and petrochemical sectors, the ROK has one
of the most energy intensive industrial structures on Earth; and it is still
growing rapidly, which of late has naturally intensified energy use, par-
ticularly electricity.

Comparative Perspectives

In the face of rapidly rising demand, Korea

stands virtually devoid of

domestic sources of energy. The only major energy resource in which
the ROK is self-sufficient is anthracite coal for its steel industry. Pro-

3. This chapter deals exclusively with South Korea (ROK); therefore,

references to Korea should refer to South Korea unless otherwise
specified.

Korea’s Energy Insecurities

duction of anthracite has declined sharply since 1990 owing to rising
production costs and the relative inconvenience of using domestic an-
thracite compared with using imported fuels.

Korea’s paucity of natural resources leaves the country no choice

but to rely heavily on imports. Of its total energy supply, 84 percent
comes from abroad—one of the highest levels in the world. By com-
parison, Japan imports 82 percent of its energy, Germany 60 percent,
and the United States only 27 percent (IEA 2004a).

Korea—obtaining 50 percent of its primary energy from oil com-

pared with a global average of 38 percent—is unusually dependent on
oil as a fuel source. Apart from oil’s heavy use in transportation as Ko-
rea becomes an automobile society, the ROK also uses oil extensively
to fuel power plants and provide home heating, with gasification still
underdeveloped in comparative terms. To make matter worse, Korea
has one of the highest levels of oil dependence on the volatile, uncertain
Middle East of any nation in the world—a dependence that has risen
sharply during the past decade.

To overcome these multiple dilemmas, both North and South Ko-

rea have been unavoidably attracted to nuclear power. In the case of
South Korea, reliance on nuclear power deepened rapidly and largely
without incident, until checked by domestic nongovernmental organiza-
tion (NGO) opposition during the 1990s. North Korea’s nuclear pro-
gram, of course, has been much more controversial and politicized
owing to the DPRK’s clear, admitted efforts to manufacture nuclear
weapons.

Korea’s Oil Insecurities

As indicated in

Figure 2.1,

oil is overwhelmingly the most important

source of primary energy in South Korea, despite the ROK’s total lack
of onshore oil and its highly exposed position in global oil markets.
Indeed, South Korea’s 50 percent dependence on oil as a fuel source is
significantly higher than even Japan’s 47 percent, which represents the
highest level among the Group of Seven (G-7) industrialized nations.
Recent oil demand growth has also been unusually high in the ROK
compared with demand growth in other advanced economies. In many
such nations, oil demand has been actually declining in the face of spi-
raling prices worldwide.

4. Figures are for 2002; they are calculated by net imports divided by total

primary energy supply.

South Korea’s Triple Energy-Security Dilemma

As shown clearly in

Figure 2.2,

oil imports are also inordinately

high in Korea relative to GDP, reflecting both the country’s energy-in-
tensive industrial structure and the utter lack of domestic oil reserves. A
shift toward a more knowledge-intensive industrial structure, centering
on computers and telecommunications, has reduced the energy inten-
siveness of Korean industrial structure, while diversification toward
natural gas and nuclear power has marginally reduced oil dependence.
Nevertheless, Korea’s distinctive oil reliance remains higher than in any
other major industrialized nation.

Korea’s oil-centric energy dilemma can be usefully understood by

examining the peninsula’s domestic energy consumption structure. Ko-
rea, like China next door, traditionally has relied heavily on coal for
heat and light. It is charcoal, for example, that typically heated the floors
under Korean homes. For many centuries, that heating method had been
a highly advanced technical innovation.

Figure 2.3

shows, however, that the historical Korean pattern of

coal reliance was transformed in the South during the 1980s and early

Coal

Natural
gas

Nuclear

Oil

0.0

10.0

20.0

30.0

40.0

50.0

South Korea

United States

Figure 2.1:

South Korea’s Heavy Reliance on Oil

Source: BP (2005).

Korea’s Energy Insecurities

1990s to a new pattern of heavy oil dependence. Indeed, South Korean
oil consumption rose 266 percent during the 1980–95 period. In fact,
during that era South Korea’s oil use rose faster than oil use in any other
Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) economy, contributing 22
percent of the entire Pacific region’s growth in oil consumption during
those years.

As Figure 2.3 clearly suggests, there have been two major trends in

the recent history of South Korean oil consumption: pre-1997 and post-
1998, with the Asian financial crisis as a watershed. During the 1987–
97 decade, oil demand expansion was explosive. Since 1998, however,
it has been largely static owing to market maturity. In 2004 Korean oil
consumption actually declined slightly.

The ROK’s high and deepening reliance on oil as an energy source

during the decade preceding the Asian financial crisis occurred for three
reasons.

■

First was an important, embedded historical reality. Korea had
grown to global economic prominence in an era when oil was
plentiful and global oil prices were steadily declining, especially
when calculated in terms of a strengthening Korean

won.

Eco-

nomic planners and senior corporate executives found it rational
in such times to capitalize on these oil-bearish trends and to

Oil demand growth (%)

Oil demand/
GDP growth

Net oil imports/
GDP (%)

South Korea

United States

Source: BP (2005), DOE (2005).

Figure 2.2:

Three Dimensions of South Korea’s Oil Vulnerability

1.6

0.1

0.2

3.6

1.0

South Korea’s Triple Energy-Security Dilemma

configure Korean industry, especially during the high-growth
pre–oil shock decade, in seemingly rational energy-intensive
fashion.

■

Second, the low and declining level of global oil prices during the
1980s and 1990s, especially when calculated in

won,

together

with the Korean government’s policy of encouraging imported oil
reliance and the growth of energy-intensive industries, gave rise
to an additional, more proximate reason for Korea’s strong oil
reliance: the highly oil-intensive character of Korea’s industrial
structure. The Korean steel, shipbuilding, petrochemical, and
fertilizer sectors remain among the most oil-intensive industries
in the world. All continue to be important to a Korean economy
that is just now making the transition to a knowledge-intensive
industrial structure that neighboring Japan undertook during the
1970s and 1980s.

■

Third is the fact that for many years Korea’s oil demand was
rising so rapidly because of Korea’s automotive revolution. After
the second oil shock of 1979–80, auto ownership sharply
expanded, encouraged by declining oil prices in

won

and coop-

erative Korean government-business efforts to develop a domes-
tic auto industry. Strengthening of the

won

after 1979 was

100

120

Coal

Oil

2004

2000

1995

1990

1985

1980

Millions of tons

Source: BP (2005).

Figure 2.3:

South Korea’s Dependence on Oil, 1980–2004

Korea’s Energy Insecurities

especially important in propelling motorization and expanded
transport demand because consumer spending tends to be
especially price sensitive.

Koreans have developed an almost American-style propensity for

driving that contrasts with the greater mass-transit reliance of their Japa-
nese neighbors. In 1999 Korea’s annual average driving mileage per
vehicle reached 19,500 kilometers, compared with 119,100 kilometers
in the United States and only 10,000 kilometers in Japan.

Gasoline con-

sumption per vehicle was 2.4 times that in Japan.

As a consequence of heavy automobile use, Korean energy con-

sumption in the transport sector rose 12-fold, from 5 to 60 million tons
of oil equivalent (MTOE) between 1980 and 1995, with most of the
gains coming in the last half of that period (Yokoburi 1998, 41–42).
This 11.6 percent average rate of annual transportation energy demand
growth in Korea (almost entirely oil) was by far the highest in APEC. It
contrasted sharply with only 3 percent annual demand growth in Japan
and 1.3 percent in the United States.

South Korea has, it should be noted, succeeded in reducing its mar-

ginal reliance on oil since the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98. Oil
demand growth of 7.3 percent in 1999, for example, was among the
highest of any major nation in the world; yet it had moderated substan-
tially by 2002 as the distortions of the Asian financial crisis period wore
off. Oil imports have also fallen—by one-tenth, to 3.6 percent of GDP.

Slower economic expansion, industrial transformation toward

knowledge-intensive industry, and energy demand saturation in the resi-
dential sector all played a role in moderating South Korea’s energy-
consumption growth. More market-oriented energy policies, to which
we will return, also helped. Because of these structural changes, Korea’s
GDP elasticity of demand for energy has steadily declined since 1999 to
levels consistently less than 1, as indicated in

Table 2.1.

For most of the

past decade, economic expansion has thus been more rapid than the
growth of energy demand. This pattern follows a trend toward energy
efficiency common to maturing economies, which has also been notice-
able in Japan since the mid-1970s.

Despite some recent moderation of Korea’s previously explosive

energy demand growth, the broad structural biases of the two decades
preceding the financial crisis nevertheless remain fundamentally in place.
South Korea continues to be a growing society in transition. The rising

5. “Industry Too Vulnerable to Oil Shock?”

Business Korea

(June 2000), 58.

South Korea’s Triple Energy-Security Dilemma

affluence and increasingly mobile lifestyle of the Korean people put
continuing upward pressure on energy demand. Oil use continues to be
high, if increasingly stable. And Korea of course remains a nation with
few domestic energy supply sources of its own.

In North Korea energy demand obviously remains much more lim-

ited than in the South. Northern energy demand could hardly go much
lower, given the current grim state of economic affairs there. Indeed, the
North’s overall supply of commercial energy fell by one-half to two-
thirds, depending on the assessment, during the course of the 1990s
(Williams et al. 2000).

There remains, however, the latent prospect of sharp energy de-

mand increases in the DPRK should political-economic circumstances
change, as the North’s energy consumption is starting from such a low
base. The North, like the South, is a society with only limited sources of
domestic supply. Also, North Korea’s electric power grid is chronically
inefficient, with the prospective capital costs of rehabilitating that sec-
tor estimated as likely to reach $20 billion to $50 billion over the com-
ing 20 years (Noland 2000, 166–67).

Korea’s Dependence on Middle East Energy

As shown clearly in

Figure 2.4,

Korea depends heavily on oil imports

from the Middle East. Indeed, Korea is much more dependent than most
industrialized nations on the volatile Middle East for its oil supply.
Korea’s heavy reliance on the Middle East for its oil supplies contrasts
especially sharply with that of the United States (21 percent in 2004)
and France (26 percent).

Korea’s reliance on Middle Eastern oil, furthermore, has been ris-

ing steadily. As indicated in Figure 2.4, that dependence was below 50
percent in 1994. Yet in one short decade, Korea’s reliance on the Middle
East rose sharply, to an average well above two-thirds of the country’s
total imports. Favorable short-run costs and deepening import relations
with new trading partners seem to account for the increase.

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Korea’s Energy Insecurities

In recent years, Korea has been trying to diversify its energy sources

in a determined attempt to escape from extreme reliance on Middle East-
ern oil. Yet Korea’s diversification efforts have focused on natural gas
rather than coal, partly because of environmental considerations. How-
ever, this fuel source transformation effort ironically has increased reli-
ance on the Middle East, which provided Korea with 55 percent of its
natural gas imports but virtually none of the coal that this gas displaced
(DOE 2005). In total, almost half of Korea’s overall primary energy was
provided by the Middle East in 2003.

Korea’s reliance on Middle Eastern energy is substantial and even

rising, but it is not necessarily perverse. Despite the Middle East’s po-
litical volatility, ways exist to reduce related energy insecurities, espe-
cially through cross-investment. Middle Eastern investment in Korea is
rising; for example, in 2005, it was announced that Dubai International
is purchasing a $312 million stake in management of Busan’s new con-
tainer port.

Two of four Korean oil companies are now controlled by

Middle Eastern firms from Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi. Only one Ko-

100

2004

2002

2000

1998

1996

1994

Percentage

Source: DOE (2005).
Note: Figure shows Korea’s reliance on oil from Gulf and Asian nations usually
considered part of the Middle East. It does not include Korea’s oil imports from
North Africa.

Figure 2.4:

South Korea’s Reliance on Middle Eastern Oil,

1993–2004

Financial Times Information,

7 March 2005.

South Korea’s Triple Energy-Security Dilemma

rean oil refiner, the SK Group, has no foreign supply partners, and it is
reportedly considering bringing in Mideast investment also. These in-
vestment partnerships enhance energy security by creating direct finan-
cial incentives for Middle Eastern firms to supply their Korean partners
predictably.

Korean National Oil Company (KNOC) is also actively making

major new investments abroad that enhance energy security. KNOC re-
portedly contemplates supplying up to 10 percent of Korea’s crude oil
itself, much of it from the Middle East. In March 2005, KNOC took part
in 20 exploration and production projects overseas, including a major
project in Libya’s Elephant Field, as well as others in Yemen, Kazakhstan,
Eritrea, and Benin.

Korea’s Nuclear Embrace

Geopolitics aside, chronic energy shortages in both North and South
Korea are clearly a major reason why both halves of the peninsula have
found nuclear power attractive, particularly since the oil shocks of the
1970s. North Korea, with substantial uranium reserves at Unggi,
Pyongsan, and Hungnam, does not even need to import the raw materi-
als. For South Korea, which lacks indigenous uranium supplies, the bur-
den of uranium imports is nevertheless minuscule compared with the
cost and logistical difficulties that Seoul’s pronounced dependence on
imports of Middle Eastern oil presents. North Korea’s controversial past
efforts to develop nuclear power are well known and will be considered
more fully later in this monograph.

In the South, nuclear power has nearly as long a history as in the

North, dating back to the 1960s. In the wake of oil shock 1, South Korea
moved aggressively toward nuclear power. Indeed, at a peak in 1987,
nuclear power provided more than 50 percent of Korea’s power actually
generated and still accounted for nearly 40 percent in 2003 (DOE 2005).

Today, nuclear plants, operating in four giant nuclear clusters around

South Korea, provide as much as 40 percent of total electricity actually
generated in the country as a whole, and 28 percent of total capacity. As
suggested on the next page in

Table 2.2,

this Korean commitment to

nuclear power is more substantial than in most other major industrial-
ized nations. Indeed, South Korea’s reliance on nuclear power for ac-

7. In Yemen, KNOC was involved in both oil and gas projects; for details

on KNOC’s offshore operations, see the KNOC Web site at www.knoc.
co.kr/eng/index.php.

Korea’s Energy Insecurities

tual power generation is the third highest in the entire world, following
France and Sweden. It is double the global average.

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Asia’s Growth Deepens

Korea’s Energy Insecurities

Korea’s energy insecurities are deeply rooted despite the remarkable
job that its policy process and private sector have done in recent years
of coping with the underlying domestic energy problems that the coun-
try faces. GDP elasticity of demand for energy has steadily declined
since 2000, driven by the emergence of new, low-energy-consumption
sectors (computers and telecommunications, for example). Improved
energy efficiency in the high-consumption areas of steel and petrochemi-
cals has also helped.

Need for Energy Ubiquitous in Northeast Asia

The international dimensions of Korean energy insecurity have grown
more difficult, even as Korea’s ability to cope with the energy challenge
has generally strengthened. One deepening international problem for
Korea, noted earlier, has been rising energy dependence on the Middle
East, especially with respect to oil and natural gas. There is also the
rapid pace of energy demand growth, and high levels of absolute de-
mand, elsewhere in Asia. Four of the top 10 primary energy consumers
in the world—China, Japan, and India in addition to Korea—are also
now located in Asia, as well as four of the top seven consumers of oil
(KKC 2005, 99, 101). All these nations are seeking large and increasing
amounts of imported energy, especially oil, along the same sea lanes
from the Middle East.

Korea’s Energy Insecurities

It thus matters greatly to Korea—both economically and strategi-

cally, even though global energy markets are of course integrated—how
energy demand and supply evolve elsewhere in the East Asian region.
That is especially true because the nations surrounding Korea—China,
Japan, and Russia, in particular—are all major powers on the world
stage, with substantial economic and geopolitical leverage of their own.
Their energy consumption patterns affect not only the world market but
also possibilities for cooperation—or conflict—closer to home.

Most of Korea’s neighbors, unfortunately for Seoul, are nearly as

energy-deficient as Korea itself. It is often noted that not a single, major,
expanding onshore oil field exists in the vast expanse from Sakhalin
south to Indonesia.

Japan, Taiwan, and coastal mainland China—a

densely populated complex of close to one billion people—all lack sig-
nificant oil and gas reserves. Within a decade, even coal is expected to
be a net import commodity, China’s position as the largest producer in
the world notwithstanding.

Energy markets, of course, are global; and energy resources should,

in theory, be flexibly transferable from one region to another. Korea’s
presence in an energy-short neighborhood should thus, in theory, not
make much practical difference. Yet the perceived realities are more
complex.

Energy vulnerabilities can clearly affect pipeline politics, including

terms of access to nearby Russian gas and oil. They also create subtle
geostrategic concerns about sea lanes and relationships with the Middle
East and Africa. Both distant areas supply Korea with oil and gas in
increasing quantities via the same long maritime routes across the In-
dian Ocean and through the South China Sea.

Those energy insecurities—linked profoundly to pipelines, sea lanes,

and regional politics—naturally fuel energy nationalism that grows more
intense as global markets tighten. Such concerns tend to be especially
pronounced in Northeast Asia because of pervasive resource shortages,
steadily rising demand, and a lack of geopolitical leverage to command
such resources that the United States, in particular, enjoys. To under-

8. Daqing, in China’s Northeast, remains somewhat important, producing

approximately one million barrels of oil a day. Yet its oil production has
been steadily declining since 2000 by about 40,000 barrels per day.
Although Daqing is to some extent supplemented by the also significant
Shengli field, the joint contribution of Daqing and Shengli is still vastly
outstripped by the explosive recent growth in overall Chinese national oil
demand.

Asia’s Growth Deepens Korea’s Energy Insecurities

stand Korea’s energy vulnerabilities, as perceived both south and north
of the DMZ, it is thus important to understand the energy circumstances
of its neighbors as well as the astonishing speed with which they are
changing.

Centrality of China in Korea’s Regional Energy Equation

China, of course, looms largest for Korea in Asian energy markets for a
number of reasons. It is, as noted in

Table 3.1,

by a significant margin

the largest energy consumer in Asia, with more than double the aggre-
gate energy demand of Japan despite Japan’s much larger economy.
China’s huge population and its low energy efficiency account for this
seeming anomaly.

Nearly 70 percent of China’s energy is consumed in the form of

coal, and Chinese consumption leads the world (BP 2005). This fact
affects Korea mainly through the environmental problems that it gener-
ates. Yet China’s oil consumption is also massive and rising rapidly.
Since 2003 China’s oil consumption has also been the second highest of
any nation in the world, after the United States, and its consumption has

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Korea’s Energy Insecurities

been growing faster than in other major consuming nations.

China ac-

counted for more than one-third of total global growth in world oil de-
mand between 2000 and 2004 (BP 2005).

The International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasts that China’s crude

oil import dependency ratio could more than double from current levels
during the coming 25 years, putting still more pressure on global energy
markets and on Korea’s bids for supply from them. China’s import-
dependency ratio will prospectively rise from 30 percent in 2000 and
roughly 40 percent in 2005 to as much as 80 percent of total demand by
2030 (IEA 2004b). Imports themselves would rise more than fivefold,
from around 2 million barrels per day to nearly 11 million. These im-
ports would be a sharply rising share of an explosively growing total
package of aggregate energy demand. The IEA also projects that Chi-
nese energy demand will increase during the coming two to three de-
cades at close to double the rate of energy demand growth in the world
economy.

Although China’s impact on global oil prices may well be generally

negative from Korea’s perspective, there is a silver lining: refined prod-
ucts. In recent years the ROK has developed an efficient oil-refining
sector, supported by a market-aligned set of product-pricing policies,
with substantial spare production capacity. China, by contrast, has in-
hibited the growth and prosperity of its refiners through price controls
on refined products and other discriminatory policies. It is no surprise
that Korea has become a large and increasingly important supplier of
refined products to China, profiting from the combination of misaligned
energy policies and buoyant demand that has recently prevailed in China.

China’s own oil imports are expected to come heavily from the

Middle East in the long run. This is a clear factor of concern to Korea,
which has similar expectations of tapping into the world’s low-cost source
of energy—a region that is simultaneously politically volatile. Currently
less than half of China’s oil flows from the Middle East, with Saudi
Arabia and Iran being the largest suppliers. The East-West Center
projects, however, that China’s overall Middle East dependency will

9. China’s consumption surpassed Japan’s in 2002. In 2004 Chinese oil

consumption was 6.7 million barrels daily, compared with 5.3 million for
Japan (BP 2005).

10. The IEA projects that Chinese primary energy demand will grow at 2.7

percent annually for the 2000–30 period, while global energy demand is
likely to grow at only 1.7 percent (IEA 2004b).

Asia’s Growth Deepens Korea’s Energy Insecurities

rise to more than 70 percent by 2015, creating the likelihood of a more
proactive Middle East diplomacy on the part of China, to which Korea
will need to respond (Wu 1999).

Japan’s Continuing Importance

Currently Japan is also a formidable factor in Asian energy markets;
Korea must both contend and, at times, cooperate with Japan in its quest
for adequate and secure energy supplies. With the second-largest economy
in the world, comprising 14 percent of global GDP, and lacking major
oil or gas reserves of its own, Japan is a massive importer of both oil
(second in the world after the United States) and natural gas (first in the
world in LNG imports, representing roughly half of the global market).
Japan’s energy imports, unlike China’s, are not rising rapidly. Yet its
absolute level of import demand is even more substantial than China’s
and is mediated by general trading companies (

sogo shosha

) that are

highly adept at natural-resource market transactions. In tight markets,
Korean firms would find them potentially formidable competitors.

India as a Rising Factor

India is also rising rapidly as a factor in the Asian energy equation. By
2004 it had become the fifth-largest energy consumer in the world and
also the sixth-largest consumer of oil, just ahead of Korea. India’s de-
mand for Middle Eastern oil is also rising rapidly, along the same sea
lanes and from essentially the same producers as Korea’s supplies.

Emerging Occasions for Cooperation and Conflict

The prospective Asian regional energy agenda that Korea confronts has,
one should certainly note, both cooperative as well as confrontational
aspects. This competitive yet politicized regional environment, with its
heavy governmental buying, has helped generate an “Asia premium” of
as much as $1 a barrel in global oil and gas markets in the view of many
regional observers,

although the lack of a regional spot market for a

benchmark crude and other market imperfections no doubt also play
important roles in generating the higher prices that Asians pay.

Rapidly rising Chinese energy demand compounds the problems.

Recently, Japan and China have also been competing sharply to finalize

11. For Chinese views of these matters, see Zha (2005).

Korea’s Energy Insecurities

a major oil pipeline routing from the Siberian interior to Russia’s Pa-
cific coast—the so-called Angarsk-Nakhodka line—on which Japan has
offered to spend more than $5 billion for construction. Russia has been
encouraging that competition and linking it to diplomatic demands of
its own, intensifying the politicized cast of regional energy markets.

Offshore Energy Prospects

Recent controversy over seabed natural resource reserves in the East
China Sea and the West Sea (Yellow Sea) combined with rising global
energy prices and the possibility of future discoveries have brought un-
resolved territorial disputes back onto the political agenda, generating
substantial tension among the neighboring countries. Territorial con-
flicts involve different sets of nations. In both instances, however, these
conflicts are both inflaming broader political relationships and inhibit-
ing the exploitation of energy reserves that could be of economic impor-
tance to energy-short Northeast Asia.

The waters around the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, known

to the Chinese as Diaoyutai, reportedly hold rich oil and gas deposits,
according to numerous media reports. Many energy specialists are skep-
tical of the actual prospects, yet the area is bitterly disputed between
Japan and China because of conflicting claims to the Senkaku Islands
themselves and also to conflicting criteria for establishing jurisdictional
rights with respect to offshore resources.

Japan claims as its jurisdictional boundary a hypothetical median

line halfway between its clearly established territories, such as Okinawa,
and the Chinese mainland. China, by contrast, asserts that the entire
East China Sea continental shelf is a “natural prolongation” of the Chi-
nese mainland that extends eastward all the way to the Japanese island
of Okinawa. The most attractive areas, from the perspective of the de-
velopment of resources, appear to lie near Japan’s hypothetical median
line, slightly on the eastern, Japanese, side of this disputed boundary.

Because of the Sino-Japanese political confrontation, no detailed

surveys of potential energy reserves in the disputed waters off the Senkaku
Islands have been made public. Some knowledgeable observers suggest
that potential reserves, especially of natural gas, could be substantial. At

12. The most important issue is the appropriate demarcation line for the

respective national exclusive economic zones. For details of the dispute,
see Suganuma (2000).

Asia’s Growth Deepens Korea’s Energy Insecurities

the extreme, Chinese estimates of potential East China Sea gas reserves
over the entire shelf range from 175 trillion to 210 trillion cubic feet in
volume, or substantially more than in either Saudi Arabia or the United
States as a whole (Harrison 2005, 5).

Western estimates of East China

Sea oil reserves, as opposed to gas reserves, have gone as high as ap-
proximately 100 billion barrels, or around 40 percent of the levels in
Saudi Arabia (Harrison 2005, 5).

Other specialists, as suggested ear-

lier, are more skeptical regarding the scale of such deposits, including
the controversial Chunxiao discoveries near the Senkaku Islands.

By 1995 Chinese geologists had identified three especially promis-

ing gas fields in the vicinity of the median line. From 1995 to 1997 they
undertook sporadic seismic surveys, which were followed by more in-
tensive exploration. In August 2003 they set up production platforms at
Chunxiao, one of them less than one mile from the median line at the
edge of disputed territory. During 2004 and early 2005, Chinese subma-
rines and then destroyers also began frequenting the area. In April 2005,
after China refused to share geological data on the three gas fields, Ja-
pan authorized three of its companies to begin test drilling on its side of
the line.

Further north in the Yellow Sea, just off the west coast of North

Korea, there is also prospect of substantial offshore reserves although
not on the scale of those expected in the Senkaku-Diaoyutai area. The
most optimistic predictions for major discoveries center on two areas:
the Kunsan Basin in the southern Yellow Sea, at the boundary of Chi-
nese and South Korean jurisdictions, and in the West Korea Bay basin
off the coast of North Korea. Petronas of Malaysia concluded a conces-
sion agreement with Pyongyang for exploration but cancelled it follow-
ing indications of Chinese displeasure. Further feasibility study and de-
velopment has stalled amid the North Korean nuclear crisis because of a
lack of agreement among North Korea, South Korea, and China regard-
ing the territorial issues involved (Paik 2005, 46–47).

13. Chinese estimates reportedly indicate East China Sea gas reserves of 175

to 210 trillion cubic feet, compared with Saudi “proven and probable”
gas reserves of 238 trillion cubic feet, and analogous U.S. reserves of
117.4 trillion cubic feet. Some knowledgeable Western analysts suggest
that such Chinese reserve estimates should be devalued by a factor of at
least five.

14. Saudi Arabia has “proven and probable” oil reserves of 261.7 billion

barrels, and the United States 22 billion.

Korea’s Energy Insecurities

China’s emergence as a major energy importer gives it not only

new incentives to bid aggressively for disputed resources, as in the East
China Sea, but also additional incentives at times to cooperate with its
neighbors. Two prospectively important areas where Korean expertise
could be catalytic in triggering regional cooperation concern joint stock-
piling programs and development of a regional energy transportation
network.

Stockpiling Programs

Korean policies for stockpiling are especially imaginative and relevant
to the problems China confronts. KNOC lends crude to refiners during
times of trouble, using profits from oil trading to expand its stockpile,
and also leases space to international oil producers to store their own oil
in Korea.

Norway’s Statoil, among others, has taken advantage of these

innovative procedures.

As energy markets tighten, stockpiling is rapidly becoming an issue

of major concern across the Asian region. Since November 2003, re-
gional oil forums have been held annually among the ASEAN + 3 na-
tions

as they seek close oil cooperation, including the establishment of

an oil-stockpiling program for the 13 member countries.

In June 2004

China hosted a foreign ministers’ meeting of the Asia Cooperation Dia-
logue, which approved the Qingdao Initiative on energy cooperation
that embodied many of these measures. Currently, only Japan and South
Korea within Asia have substantial oil stockpiles (Kanekiyo 2005), to-
taling approximately 173 and 67 days, respectively, so such measures,
particularly in the creative forms that Korea has pioneered, could con-
tribute significantly to enhanced regional energy security.

Natural Gas Pipelines

Cooperation for supplies of natural gas is among the most important
potential areas for collective action in Northeast Asia. The region is

15. See the KNOC Web site for additional information on oil stockpiling

projects, www.knoc.co.kr/eng/index.php.

16. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations comprises Brunei

Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philip-
pines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. ASEAN + 3 refers to the
members of ASEAN plus China, Japan, and South Korea.

17. See the Web site of the ASEAN Center for Energy, www.aseanenergy.org/.

Asia’s Growth Deepens Korea’s Energy Insecurities

unique globally in being both economically advanced and industrial-
ized, yet still lacking a regional gas grid. China, at the end of 2004 after
years of effort, finally completed its West-East pipeline project to bring
natural gas from Xinjiang to Shanghai. Plans to extend pipelines as far
as Korea remain enmeshed in geopolitics

—yet pipeline extensions have

important future potential, possibly in the context of the six-party politi-
cal-economic dialogue now emerging in connection with the North Ko-
rean nuclear talks.

Japan has been working together with Russian firms and Royal Dutch

Shell on the Sakhalin II project, which started to provide oil in 2004
although natural gas will not be generated in substantial amounts until
around 2007.

It appears committed to LNG, but Sakhalin I gas may be

available for pipeline transmission to Korea. Talks about other interna-
tional natural gas pipelines continue among large Asian consumers such
as China, South Korea, and Japan and neighboring producers Russia,
Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan. Projects among Russia, China, and Korea
will be considered in chapter 4.

Another promising gas provider within the East Asian region, al-

though one geographically isolated from Korea, is ASEAN. Under the
ASEAN Vision 2020, Southeast Asian nations have proposed a trans-
ASEAN gas pipeline among the member countries, at a cost of $7 bil-
lion. The project would, if realized, involve seven major interconnected
gas pipelines. As early as 2002, India expressed a desire to extend the
ASEAN pipeline to India via Myanmar and Bangladesh, although the
feasibility remains to be demonstrated.

The infrastructural costs of gas

pipelines are of course huge and the lead times long, making uncertain
political parameters and regulatory environments a continuing obstacle
to project realization.

South Korea, as a part of the Eurasian continent, is better situated

geographically than Japan to participate in building gas pipelines, al-
though both countries are pivotal participants in the six-party process
that could be a catalyst for such pipelines. South Korea’s favorable situ-
ation is complicated, however, by the fact that many such pipeline routes

18. “PetroChina Intends to Pave Second West-East Gas Pipeline,”

SinoCast

China Business Daily News,

31 December 2004.

19. Additional information is available on the Web site of Sakhalin Energy

Investment Company Ltd., www.sakhalinenergy.com/.

20. India Plans to Seek Trans-ASEAN Gas Pipeline Extension,”

FT Global

NewsWire,

18 October 2002.

Korea’s Energy Insecurities

would most logically transit North Korea before reaching Seoul. The
slow resolution of the North Korean nuclear issue as well as related
financial difficulties have delayed pipeline links among Russia, China,
and the ROK. Economic and geopolitical preconditions for the realiza-
tion of an enhanced pipeline network will be considered in chapter 4.

Energy Efficiency Programs

Another major prospective area for regional cooperation is in the quest
for energy-efficiency improvements. China’s energy efficiency, in par-
ticular, is extremely low, which compounds the already substantial im-
pact of China’s rapid economic growth on global energy markets and on
Korea’s own energy situation. Energy efficiency in China remains only
one-ninth of Japan’s efficiency, one-fifth of the European Union’s, and
40 percent of U.S. energy efficiency, according to the Chinese State
Energy Research Institute. Even Chinese air conditioners, which one
might presume to be made according to a global standard, are roughly
one-fifth less efficient than the world average.

Energy consumption at

steel mills in China remains 50 percent higher than consumption in Ja-
pan, and more than 40 percent higher than in Korea (Kanekiyo 2005).
Even Chinese electric power generators consume one-fifth more energy
per unit of output than their U.S. counterparts (Kanekiyo 2005). Korea,
with recent experience coping with problems like those in China, is well
placed to aid China in improving energy efficiency or in cooperating
with neighbors such as Japan in doing so.

Environmental Protection

China obviously has good reasons to tackle environmental issues ag-
gressively, and its neighbors, including Korea, have incentive to help.
Acid rain and other forms of air pollution from China are major prob-
lems for Korea’s forests and for its urban dwellers as well. Japan is
likewise affected, and it shares a common interest with Korea in cooper-
ating with China.

Coal is in most forms a highly polluting fuel, contributing heavily

to such problems as acid rain, and it still accounts for two-thirds of
China’s primary energy consumption. Motorization and diffusion of home

21. “Electrical Inefficiency a Dark Spot for China: Cities Glow for Show as

Factories Black Out,”

Washington Post,

9 August 2005.

Asia’s Growth Deepens Korea’s Energy Insecurities

electric appliances like air conditioners and refrigerators are also pro-
ceeding rapidly in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), worsening
sulfur dioxide emissions and accelerating global warming tendencies.

Recently, China has been taking environmental protection seriously;

pollution is becoming a serious issue, especially because of the impend-
ing, politically important Beijing Olympics. Construction of as many as
22 major dams and power stations in China, including the massive Three
Gorges project, involving $14 billion in total investment has slowed or
stopped pending environmental review. Projects out of compliance, in-
cluding a $5 billion hydropower station in Sichuan province, are report-
edly being forced to pay significant fines.

Despite recent regulatory tightening, China continues to need tech-

nical assistance and financial aid in the area of environmental protec-
tion. Japan has been supportive in such fields as reforestation.

Japan

and China have also been jointly studying ways to develop and evaluate
bio-coal briquettes, a substitute for coal, as a means of lessening air
pollution (Hayami et al. 2003). Like Japan, Korea can also support China
in the environmental area on the basis of its own experience; coal-use
efficiency, dissemination of clean-coal technology, and natural gas pro-
motion appear to be especially promising areas for cooperation.

Thus, potentially important areas for regional energy cooperation

can allow Korea to play a leading role. So far, however, despite some
sporadic cooperation and disturbingly substantial conflict, little con-
certed or systematic cooperation among Korea, Japan, and China has
emerged, creating opportunity costs for the whole region. Ironically, it
has taken the North Korean nuclear issue, and the catalytic role of the
United States since early 2005 in pursuing this, to bring the reluctant
Northeast Asian nations to the negotiating table. This configuration is,
however, finally generating a promising multilateral dynamic that could
be constructive in addressing the serious problems considered in the
following chapters.

22. “China Enforcing Green Laws Suddenly; Beijing Has Targeted 22 Major

Energy Projects to Assess Their Environmental Impact,”

Christian

Science Monitor,

10 February 2005.

23. For details, see the Web site of Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs,

www.mofa.go.jp/index.html.

North Korea

and the Northeast Asian

Energy Equation

North Korea’s energy circumstances are in many respects an extreme
version of those that South Korea confronts: some coal and hydroelec-
tric power, but no onshore oil reserves and no natural gas. The most
attractive potential sources of the hydrocarbons for North Korea, as for
South Korea, lie in the Middle East, more than 6,000 miles away. For
both North and South, nuclear power has a certain natural logic in en-
ergy terms, political-military issues aside. So does natural gas, with
Korea’s huge Russian neighbor holding nearly one-third of global proven
reserves.

The energy circumstances of North Korea are different from its

southern twin in one massive way: the North’s isolation from the inter-
national system as a result of its eccentric foreign policies, its belliger-
ent military posturing, and its persistent attempts to develop nuclear
weapons and other instruments of mass destruction. Since the collapse
of the Soviet Union, its last consistent ally, at the end of 1991, North
Korea’s energy infrastructure, like its national economy more generally,
has decayed sharply. No foreign energy assistance, other than heavy oil
supplied under the Agreed Framework between 1995 and 2002, has come
to the country’s aid.

North Korea, like South Korea, historically has had a high-energy-

use economy (Noland 2000, 143). In the North’s case, this was caused
by its industrial portfolio, which was focused on heavy and chemical

Korea’s Energy Insecurities

industries such as metals, machinery, chemicals, mining, and power that
were bequeathed largely by the Japanese. The heavy industrial bias, with
its high-energy-use orientation, was then perpetuated and even intensi-
fied during the first two decades after the Korean War as the DPRK
economy moved to an increasingly militarized footing.

Primary commercial energy use in the DPRK per unit of output was

approximately three times the level in China in 1990 and about half the
level in Japan, which had a GDP per capita 20 times as high as North
Korea at the time (Noland 2000, 144). Inefficient use of fuels, owing to
obsolete equipment as well as lack of market pricing and reliance on
relatively less efficient fuels such as coal, has intensified the high-
energy bias originally created by industrial structure.

This high-energy orientation of the North’s economy, together with

poor underlying energy resource endowments and the importance of
energy to North Korea’s military, make energy a priority concern for the
DPRK’s political-military leadership. Kim Il-sung noted in the mid-1980s
that “[w]ithout electricity, we cannot produce anything, either in peace-
time or wartime” (Ahn 2003, 118). Kim’s statement is proving to be
even more true now, a generation later.

North Korea’s leadership appears concerned not only with the quan-

tity of energy inputs for the DPRK’s economy but, increasingly, with
their quality as well. Power outages and the current volatility of operat-
ing current, among other problems, have become increasingly pro-
nounced over the past decade as North Korea’s electric power grid, which
dates back in unified national form to 1958, becomes increasingly obso-
lescent. As the information revolution proceeds worldwide, in both its
civilian and military dimensions, and as state-of-the-art industrial facili-
ties become more and more technology intensive, the quality of electric
power becomes more important to the DPRK in all aspects of economic
and military life. A computerized society, North Korea is beginning to
discover, cannot run on the erratic power supply with which Pyongyang,
not to mention provincial towns, is presently afflicted.

North Korea’s Domestic Energy Situation

North Korea’s domestic energy situation needs to be considered in terms
of four basic aspects: supply of basic energy, electric power generation,
electric power transmission, and energy alternatives or secondary en-
ergy usage apart from electric power. As noted in chapter 1, electric
power is the North’s Achilles’ heel, where its energy problems come
together, and the factor that most directly affects the functioning of the

North Korea and the Northeast Asian Energy Equation

North’s overall economy. The DPRK’s circumstances are dire along all
four basic aspects, and the energy problems that the North confronts in
all these areas are interrelated. Yet the nature of the difficulties involved
is somewhat different in each area.

Supply of Basic Energy

In terms of basic energy supply—that is, the availability of coal, hydro-
electric power, oil, natural gas, and nuclear power—North Korea’s en-
ergy insecurities are broadly similar to those of South Korea, Taiwan,
and Japan. North Korea does not have any major operating onshore oil
fields although in August 2002 Sovereign Ventures Pte. Ltd. (SVPL) of
Singapore announced that it had found minor oil and gas reserves in its
contracted area of North Korea, on the Chinese border along the Tumen
River (Harrison 2005, 44).

The DPRK does appear to have potentially major offshore oil de-

posits located on the seabed west of Anju in the Yellow Sea, with poten-
tial reserves of as much as 12 billion barrels of oil (Harrison 2005, 13).
North Korea has tried to develop these offshore reserves in cooperation
with a wide range of foreign parties, including the Chinese (1965–80);
the Soviets (1986); the Australians (1988–90); the Swedes (1993); the
Malaysians (1997); the Singaporeans (2001); and the British (2004) (Paik
2005, 39–49). Yet on each occasion either territorial issues between the
DPRK and nearby China or financial and legal questions prevented these
ventures from achieving meaningful results.

Ultimately, serious exploration of these promising offshore oil re-

serves will need to await a resolution of the Korean nuclear crisis. The
prospects of such exploration could be a meaningful incentive for the
DPRK to accede to and actually observe an agreement acceptable to the
other five parties to the nuclear talks. Proximity and territorial issues
vis-à-vis China make it clear that actual exploration would also require
the assent of China, which would retain leverage in the actual develop-
ment process also.

North Korea, to be sure, does have substantial hydroelectric power

capacity; in fact, the North’s capacity is well over double the South’s
despite the huge converse gap between the capacities of the Koreas in
other aspects of energy.

Its mountainous terrain and relatively plenti-

24. Actual hydroelectric power generation in the North appears to have been

around 7.60 million kilowatts in 2002, compared with 3.15 million
kilowatts in the South (Ahn 2004, 121–22).

Korea’s Energy Insecurities

ful rainfall provide the DPRK with unusual hydroelectric potential from
a global comparative standpoint. Its rate of developable hydroelectric
power per square kilometer is 77.4 kilowatts compared with the global
average of 50 kilowatts (Ahn 2004, 21).

Hydro provides well over half of today’s electric power supply in

the DPRK, and production could clearly go higher with additional capi-
tal investment and application of more sophisticated technology.

Yet,

during the Korean dry season, the operating capacity of hydroelectric
power plants in the DPRK drops sharply, severely decreasing the amount
of power generated and, thus, giving a distinctly cyclical character to
North Korea’s secondary energy supply. This is especially inconvenient
and frustrating to North Korean economic planners because 85 percent
of the DPRK’s hydropower is harnessed for industrial use.

North Korea also has significant coal resources, especially anthra-

cite and lignite coal, mostly produced from underground mines (Von
Hippel et al. 2001, 12). This domestic coal, although relatively low in
quality, is nevertheless North Korea’s main fuel for electricity genera-
tion. Yet coal mining usually requires electricity for lighting, jackham-
mers, and moving coal out of the mines.

In addition, many important coal seams are actually beneath the

seabed, especially off the western coast near Anju, which requires sea-
water to be continuously pumped out for the mines to operate. Several
of these mines were flooded in the mid-1990s. In addition, the coal that
can be produced in North Korea is uneven in quality, which creates
significant operational problems, especially for new coal-fired plants.

In 2001, coal provided approximately 86 percent of North Korea’s

primary energy consumption, a share that rose sharply during the 1990s
as the DPRK’s isolation from the broader world intensified. Following
the halt of KEDO crude oil shipments in December 2002, North Korea
turned even more intensively to coal as the only fuel it could increase
through its own efforts. In 2003, for example, the North increased bud-
get allocations to coal production by more than 30 percent—by far the
largest increase in the country’s nonmilitary budget.

The DPRK is at-

25. In 2002 hydroelectricity contributed about 54 percent of the total

electricity supply in the DPRK; see the IEA Web site, wwwiea.org/.

26. Other budget expenditure increases included agriculture (increase of 21.3

percent), science and technology (increase of 15.7 percent), and electric-
ity (increase of 12.8 percent) (Ahn 2004, 54).

North Korea and the Northeast Asian Energy Equation

tempting to increase coal production by both improving technology and
modernizing existing large-scale mines as it also develops smaller mines.

A final crucial element of North Korea’s primary energy situation

is the impact that the suspension of the KEDO agreement is having on
the DPRK’s energy circumstances. This impact is concentrated at the
Pyongyang thermoelectric power plant—the one plant in North Korea
equipped to be fueled by heavy oil. This plant used 2,000 to 5,000 tons
of crude oil supplied by the United States during the seven years the
KEDO agreement was operational. In January 2003, however, after the
halt in KEDO heavy-oil shipments, only 6 of 13 boilers were operating,
and the electricity generated fell to the lowest level of the generator’s
capacity (KDI 2003, 83). Suspension of the 1995 agreement has appar-
ently continued to have a noticeable impact that should provide the DPRK
with tangible economic incentives for resolution of the nuclear crisis.

Electric Power Generation

Electric power generation has been a central priority of the North Ko-
rean regime for nearly a half century, as noted earlier. Indeed, it lay at
the heart of the first Seven-Year Plan (1961–70). That plan stressed the
development of thermal-power generation to supplement the hydroelec-
tric power on which the DPRK relied for 90 percent of its total electric-
ity supply at the time.

Expanding power generation was also consistently a priority of the

Six-Year Plan (1971–76); the second Seven-Year Plan (1978–84); and
the third Seven-Year Plan (1987–93). Although the DPRK has not drafted
comprehensive economic plans since the last of these was completed,
its most recent attempt at shaping its economic future—the Three-Year
Plan for Fuel and Power (2003–05)—concentrates specifically on that
sector, suggesting the continuing importance to North Korea’s techno-
cratic leaders of electric power (Ahn 2004, 97–121).

Despite the importance of electric power generation capacity to the

DPRK’s economic development and the priority that improvements in
that area appear to hold for the nation’s leaders, power generation re-
mains a serious domestic economic constraint. Hydroelectric power
plants generate approximately two-thirds of North Korea’s electricity,
and thermal power plants approximately one-third. All except the
Pyongyang thermal power station, which relied on the heavy fuel oil
that was cut off when the KEDO agreement was suspended in 2002, are
coal fired.

Korea’s Energy Insecurities

The DPRK’s electricity supply thus suffers indirectly from a range

of difficulties relating to coal production and transportation. One is the
decrepit quality of the rolling stock that transports 90 percent of North
Korea’s coal by rail. In addition to this, as much as 85 percent of the
DPRK’s hydroelectric capacity has been damaged by flooding (Ivanov
2002, 13).

Overall, as little as 20 to 30 percent of installed North Korean ca-

pacity for electric power generation, which totals roughly 8 to 10 giga-
watts, may actually be operable (Von Hippel et al. 2001, 13). This is
sharply less than at the time of the Soviet collapse at the end of 1991,
when the downward spiral in the DPRK’s economic circumstances be-
gan to accelerate. Infrastructural decline, a drop in coal production, low
quality of coal, and a sharp decrease in oil imports have intensified these
problems.

Infrastructural decline has led to a striking and seemingly paradoxical

inverse relationship between generating capacity and power production
in the North since the collapse of the Soviet Union. As indicated in

Table 4.1,

power production capacity expanded more than 55 percent

between 1990 and 2003, much of it concentrated in small-scale local
plants largely independent of the unreliable national grid. Yet actual
power production appears to have declined by more than 40 percent
during the same period. By 2003 North Korea’s generating capacity
was less than one-seventh of that in the South, but its actual power pro-
duction was only one-thirteenth that of the South owing to chronic pro-
duction and transmission difficulties and a grid in very poor condition.

The North Korean government itself is clearly concentrating a ma-

jor share of the domestic resources it devotes to nonmilitary pursuits on
the electric power sector. It invests its revenues from People’s Subsis-
tence Bonds, for example, in power generation (Ahn 2004, 99). Yet this
priority treatment is not effectively arresting the steady deterioration of
a crucial sector whose decay is generating pervasive, corrosive effects
across the DPRK political economy as a whole. North Korea can thus
be expected to value highly any major foreign proposals for energy as-
sistance targeted in the electric power generation and transmission ar-
eas. Such projects, together with appropriate service provision and pro-

27. The drop in coal production and quality depress operating ratios because

of their impact on transportation; most of the coal used in North Korean
power plants, ironically, is transported by rail. The decline in oil imports
obviously affects the ability of oil-fired plants to operate.

North Korea and the Northeast Asian Energy Equation

grams for training personnel, could hold the key to the North’s eco-
nomic revival.

Electric Power Transmission

Electric power transmission is a third major difficulty that North Korea
has with its supply of domestic energy; it is related closely to problems
of generation. North Korea’s original power grid was created in Japa-
nese colonial days, well over 60 years ago, and was decimated during
the Korean War. Refurbished by the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s,
the grid has experienced inadequate servicing since the collapse of the
USSR at the end of 1991. The lack of spare parts, scavenging of metal
(as barter for food) from remote lines in the countryside, and general
physical deterioration have severely degraded the system. Power out-
ages are thus common throughout the country, including even in
Pyongyang, and energy loss through inefficient transmission is enormous.

As late as the early 1990s, connections between elements of the

power grid’s transmission and distribution system were in fact operated
by telephone and telex, without the support of automation or computer
systems (Hayes et al. 2005). A United Nations project during that pe-
riod did reportedly install some control equipment at a power plant and
at selected control centers in the Pyongyang area, but few other system
upgrades have been performed. As a consequence, power outages, poor
frequency control, and other technical problems continue to plague the

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Korea’s Energy Insecurities

system. Voltage and frequency fluctuations are orders of magnitude
greater than international standards.

North Korea has taken recent steps to address one of its serious

electric power grid problems. In mid-2005 North Korea announced a
new, computerized grid management system that would allow the
DPRK’s electric power providers to know exactly how much power was
being consumed by a given consumer in any region.

This new system

would also allow the DPRK’s electricity providers to cut off or limit the
amount of power consumed by any given consumer. It remains unclear
how effectively the proposed system will be implemented or how much
it will actually enhance much-needed energy efficiency.

Energy Alternatives: Nuclear and Beyond

Given North Korea’s underlying lack of oil and gas, together with the
mounting infrastructural problems it confronts in both electric power
generation and transmission, the DPRK naturally has a long-standing
and perhaps deepening interest in civilian nuclear power, quite apart
from any military applications. This interest in civilian nuclear power is
further enhanced by the fact that North Korea is self-sufficient in ura-
nium production, with substantial domestic deposits in the Unggi,
Pyongsan, and Hungnam regions of the DPRK. These deposits, com-
bined with North Korea’s growing technical capacities, give Pyongyang
the potential ability to operate a closed nuclear fuel cycle quite indepen-
dent of the broader world. In short, nuclear power is North Korea’s
ultimate route to both energy independence and political autonomy.

Roughly 28 percent of South Korea’s generating capacity is nuclear,

but North Korea currently has none (Hayes et al. 2005). It does, of course,
operate one 5,000-kilowatt pilot nuclear plant at Yongbyon, at which
construction started in 1979 and operation began in 1986. This pilot
plant, modeled after the Calder Hall nuclear facility in the United King-
dom, uses natural uranium as fuel and, to provide weapons-grade pluto-
nium for North Korea’s military nuclear program, has produced the 8,000
irradiated fuel rods that have apparently been reprocessed since the break-
down of the Agreed Framework in 2002.

Under the Agreed Framework, concluded between North Korea and

the United States in October 1994, North Korea was to suspend con-
struction on its suspect nuclear projects. In return, two 1,000-megawatt

28.

Asia Pulse,

1 August 2005.

North Korea and the Northeast Asian Energy Equation

light-water reactors (LWRs) were to be provided to the DPRK by a
target date of 2003 as well as 500,000 metric tons of heavy fuel oil
annually until the reactors became operational. These provisions were
meant to replace the potential energy supply from the suspect nuclear
projects, including Yongbyon. Upon completion of the reactors and af-
ter a three-year grace period, North Korea was to begin repaying the
cost of these new reactors over 17 years.

Construction actually began on one of the reactors, at Kumho in

North Korea, with South Korea and Japan expending approximately $1
billion each in support of the project through KEDO, which was estab-
lished under the Agreed Framework. A freeze was imposed on the Kumho
reactor project in November 2003, however, and activity at the con-
struction site has since focused on preservation and maintenance of fa-
cilities and plants on which construction had previously begun (KEDO
2004, 5). The partly finished Kumho project, nominally consisting of
two LWRs, remains the only clearly civilian nuclear facility in North
Korea.

Apart from nuclear power, still in its controversial infancy in North

Korea, few substantial alternatives to coal and hydroelectric power have
proceeded very far. Natural gas—an important option in much of the
world because of its high energy efficiency and positive environmental
qualities—is conspicuously difficult to develop under current circum-
stances in the DPRK despite the proximity of Russia with more than 30
percent of proven global gas reserves. Should a trans-Korean gas pipe-
line materialize, natural gas could be important for electric power gen-
eration through a series of moderate-sized, combined-cycle, gas-fired
plants along the pipeline. Such a prospect is, however, infeasible over
the short run, and North Korea cannot afford the substantial foreign-
exchange cost of importing LNG or constructing the infrastructure to
use it effectively (Calder 2004).

In the North Korean countryside, biomass—involving the conver-

sion of animal and human fertilizer into energy—remains a major source
of power, suggesting how desperate and how disconnected from the main-
stream national economy much of the countryside has become. Biomass
is important in India and Africa but is rarely used in the industrialized
world. In 2002, such combustibles, renewables, and wastes accounted
for 5.2 percent of the DPRK’s total primary energy consumption (Komaki
2005, 79). With the assistance of the Nautilus Institute, which is based
in San Francisco, California, North Korea has also built seven wind-

Korea’s Energy Insecurities

powered generators, although the generating capacity is only nine kilo-
watts per unit (Ahn 2003, 122).

Review and Prospects

North Korea’s energy insecurities thus mirror those of the ROK itself.
The DPRK lacks both oil and natural gas although there is some possi-
bility of significant offshore reserves of both, provided territorial dis-
putes with neighboring China can be resolved and foreign capital and
technology successfully attracted. Indeed, the prospect of assistance with
offshore energy development is one little-recognized option of potential
value to North Korea that might be considered during the ongoing six-
party nuclear negotiations.

In the political-military sphere, North Korea’s most direct energy

vulnerability is clearly its lack of oil. Petroleum products, of course,
would be vital to any extended military action against South Korea or
other nations—on land, in the air, or at sea—and those vital petroleum
products appear to be in extremely short supply in the DPRK at present.
Although a decade ago North Korea obtained substantial oil from Iran,
its supplies have been increasingly limited to China, giving the PRC
significant potential leverage against the North that it presently appears
loath to exercise.

North Korea’s most pressing energy weakness on the civilian side

of its political economy clearly relates to electric power: both genera-
tion and transmission. Two-thirds of the DPRK’s electricity, including
85 percent of that supplied to industry, is hydropower, which has the
great disadvantage of being subject to seasonal variation. The thermal
one-third of power capacity is plagued by transportation difficulties for
coal, and by the unavailability of heavy fuel oil, which was provided by
the United States until the breakdown of the KEDO agreement in De-
cember 2002.

North Korea’s electric power grid, now close to half a century old

even in its post–Korean War incarnation, is likewise in increasingly pre-
carious shape. Outages and radical voltage fluctuations in the domestic
grid are common. The national grid is increasingly breaking down and
becoming regionalized, with a proliferation of small, inefficient power
plants providing decentralized sources of power.

The crisis of the domestic power grid is serious from a North Ko-

rean perspective for two key reasons: the power grid inhibits economic
development in existing sectors; and it complicates the task of upgrad-
ing industrial processes, utilities, and potential military capacity through

North Korea and the Northeast Asian Energy Equation

computerization and automation. Stagnation in electric power develop-
ment, in short, is becoming a straitjacket for the whole North Korean
political economy, crippling its ability to cope with global technological
developments far beyond the sphere of energy.

Resolution of North Korea’s chronic energy problems is obviously

of priority interest to the DPRK, although its actual willingness to trade
off its military nuclear program for civilian energy assistance remains
somewhat unclear, the September 2005 Beijing six-party declaration
notwithstanding. The fact that the DPRK’s first step back into the eco-
nomic-planning arena, after long-term plans were discontinued in the
early 1990s, was the Three-Year Plan for Fuel and Power (2003–05)
suggests this priority. So do high declared budget allocations to both
coal production and electric power.

Possibility of Six-Party Cooperation

Should a viable resolution to the North Korean nuclear problem—in all
its dimensions—finally be achieved, much potential exists for continu-
ing six-party cooperation to address the DPRK’s energy problems. In-
deed, from an economic perspective, the six-party framework appears
to be an ideal vehicle for doing so. Capabilities and incentives of each
of the six parties in addressing North Korean energy issues strongly
complement one another and are enhanced by thinking and planning in
a broad regional context. The Northeast Asian region as a whole, after
all, has both severe prospective energy shortages, especially with re-
spect to electric power, and major underlying regional strengths, par-
ticularly in natural gas reserves and hydroelectric potential.

Given the prospects of rising interdependence and ultimate reunifi-

cation, South Korea has strong incentives to cooperate and to invest
heavily in North Korean infrastructure as the shadows of reunification
deepen. Japan has relevant technology, especially in long-distance power
transmission and energy efficiency, and is widely expected to make a
major financial contribution to North Korean economic development at
some point in order to normalize political relations and resolve histori-
cal issues.

Russia’s incentives to cooperate, and its potential contribution, are

also substantial. Apart from its huge long-term potential as a natural gas
and hydropower supplier, Russia built most of the thermal power plants
currently operating in North Korea, and its support with power genera-
tion and wiring would be natural. China’s assent to any offshore North
Korean energy development that might transpire in the West Sea would

Korea’s Energy Insecurities

be needed, and the PRC could help with refurbishing the two oil pipe-
lines connecting China and the DPRK, as well as with construction of
energy infrastructure.

A U.S. role in North Korean energy development—obviously fol-

lowing full resolution of the nuclear crisis, including the DPRK’s clear
abandonment of its military nuclear program—could be important for
diplomatic reasons, and the economic contribution could be significant
also. U.S. NGOs have already helped the DPRK in the alternate energy
area, and the United States provided heavy fuel oil to the North under
KEDO. U.S. energy exploration, production, and transmission technol-
ogy is the state of the art in many areas and could well be provided if the
nuclear issue were fully resolved. U.S. support could also be crucial to
provision of assistance by the World Bank and other global financial
institutions that would no doubt need to provide a major part of the
funding for any large-scale North Korean energy development projects.

The U.S. role within the broader six-party nuclear negotiation pro-

cess is so pivotal that a U.S.-sponsored Northeast Asian energy coop-
eration initiative—laying out a vision for multilateral cooperation be-
yond resolution of the nuclear crisis—makes eminent sense. It needs,
however, to be accompanied by reinforced bilateral consultation with
the ROK and with Japan, on related issues. However effective alliance
consultation may have recently been on conventional political-military
issues with these two key allies, it can usefully be deepened at the inter-
face of energy and security.

Seoul’s Energy Options

for the Future

Amid a simultaneous strategic nuclear controversy and deepening en-
ergy crisis, the Korean peninsula is at a historic crossroads. Both Ko-
rean governments, together with Korean society and well-wishers
throughout the world, need to take decisive steps to both solve the nuclear
crisis and deal with the peninsula’s deepening energy problems while
being sensitive to the linkages between the North and the South and to
the momentous long-term implications of the actions themselves. There
is a historic chance now for a multilateral package that can both speak to
Korea’s profound energy insecurities—the South’s as well as the
North’s—and help bring peace to one of the most potentially volatile
regions on Earth.

Previous chapters explain the energy insecurities of the two Koreas

and how they came to be; they note the total lack of onshore oil and gas
on both sides of the DMZ and the surprisingly parallel vulnerabilities
for the energy-intensive economies of both North and South that these
unusual deficiencies create. They also detail the rapid recent surge of
energy demand throughout East Asia and the nuanced challenges and
opportunities that this shifting regional dynamic poses for Korea.

This chapter looks beyond the present toward a potentially mo-

mentous and dynamic, yet also chronically uncertain, Korean energy
future. It does not attempt to forecast that future or prescribe which
policy course should be taken. In the interest of ensuring longer-term
relevance, it strives instead to outline in detail the emerging energy op-
tions that the two Koreas confront. In doing so, it strives to cast light for

Korea’s Energy Insecurities

general readers, in a timeless way, on what choices key actors can po-
tentially make as well as the pros and cons of making them.

Fuel Choices

Korean consumers have five basic choices among varieties of fuel: oil,
natural gas, nuclear power, hydroelectric power, and alternative forms
of energy. Each choice is to some extent historically embedded—the
absence of pipelines, for example, makes a short-run choice of natural
gas more difficult in Korea than it would be in the United States, Canada,
or Western Europe. Yet there are also substantial degrees of freedom
that this chapter will attempt to explicate.

Apart from the interfuel issue (choice among types of fuel), there is

also the important issue of energy conservation. North Korea has one of
the most energy-inefficient economies in the world, even as it ranks
simultaneously among the most deprived in terms of energy supply.
Energy efficiency thus needs to be a front-rank issue for the DPRK. It is
also important for the ROK, which has its own chronic energy vulner-
abilities as well as levels of energy efficiency that remain significantly
behind Japan, even if the efficiencies in South Korea are substantially
higher than in either China or the United States.

The various interfuel choices that the two Koreas confront vary

with respect to their attractiveness—in terms of both environmental and
energy security parameters—as well as cost structure. Broadly speak-
ing, nuclear power, coal, and natural gas use have relatively high up-
front capital costs, in declining order of magnitude. Yet they have con-
verse patterns of operating costs, with nuclear power, waste-storage is-
sues apart, being the cheapest once high initial construction costs have
been completed. These differences in cost structure make assumptions
regarding who bears construction costs and the prognosis for energy
prices crucially important for determining optimal interfuel choices, from
an economic standpoint. The questions of construction cost are precisely
the sort of issues in play through the six-party process.

Choices in favor of oil and coal are to some extent embedded in

both parts of the peninsula, but they are not necessarily the most attrac-
tive choices for Korea’s future. Broadly speaking, the optimal strategy
for both Koreas, from an energy-security perspective, is to move from
coal and oil toward natural gas, nuclear power, and alternate energies—
in other words, from the lower left-hand to the upper right-hand quad-
rants of

Figure 5.1.

The stronger the assumption of outside assistance—

through the six-party process, for example—the stronger these transi-

Seoul’s Energy Options for the Future

tion imperatives become because of the high up-front capital costs in-
volved. The feasibility and attractiveness of nuclear power are particu-
larly affected, from a cost standpoint, by one’s assumptions regarding
outside assistance.

Nuclear power, alternative forms of energy such as wind power,

and natural gas are all attractive options for Korea for different reasons.

Nuclear Power

Nuclear power will also most likely be an economically attractive op-
tion for both North and South or, equally, for a reunified Korea in the
long term, assuming relatively high energy prices, although it is an alter-
native with important logistical and political downsides. Its attractive-
ness is enhanced greatly, relative to other options, as noted above, when
there is some provision for outside assistance because that neutralizes
the otherwise important drawbacks of high up-front capital costs. It would
thus not be surprising, from a microeconomic standpoint, that the DPRK
would be eager for a civilian nuclear plant, even apart from its clear
military aspirations in the nuclear area.

Negative

Positive

ositiv

Negativ

Energy security

vironmentally fr

iendly

Coal

Oil

Natural gas
Nuclear power
Alternative energy

Figure 5.1:

Interfuel Choices for the Korean Peninsula

Korea’s Energy Insecurities

Installed nuclear power already comprises approximately 28 per-

cent of Korea’s electric generating capacity, and its marginal costs of
production are the lowest of any energy alternative. The only needed
raw material, after all, is uranium, potentially available rather inexpen-
sively even on the Korean peninsula itself. Yet public opposition to
nuclear power, leveraged by democratization, has risen sharply during
the past two decades because of its safety and storage problems. New
nuclear plants are also expensive to build, especially now that a range of
security precautions have proliferated since Three Mile Island, Cherno-
byl, and 11 September 2001.

Alternative Energy

Alternative energy is a third relatively attractive option for Korea. It
provides a large measure of energy security and is also environmentally
friendly. Both capital costs and operating costs are relatively low. North
Korea has already built seven windmills with the aid of the Nautilus
Institute, and South Korea plans to include about 10 gigawatts of re-
newable energy-powered generation, especially wind-powered energy,
in its own plans to expand capacity (Chung 2005). Yet the production
economics of alternate energy are such that it cannot easily become the
sort of major alternative to oil and coal that natural gas and nuclear
power can potentially be.

Natural Gas

Natural gas is attractive because it is highly efficient and generates little
environmental pollution. It is somewhat cumbersome to use in transpor-
tation although Korea makes extensive use of both gas-powered buses
and liquefied petroleum gas–powered taxis. Gas is relatively cost-
effective to use in electric power plants; indeed, so-called combined
cycle gas-fired thermal power plants are said to be the most economi-
cally attractive power plants in the world today when both capital and
operating costs are taken into consideration. They provided 26.3 per-
cent of South Korea’s generating capacity in 2004 (KEPCO 2004), and
the likelihood is that this ratio will rise steadily higher in coming years.

Capital costs for natural gas are also relatively low, depending on

project configuration, relative to nuclear power. Yet Korea, like its North-
east Asian neighbors, uses relatively little gas, despite that fuel’s intrin-
sically attractive properties. In North Korea, gas use is negligible. In

Seoul’s Energy Options for the Future

South Korea, only 13.1 percent of South Korea’s primary energy is de-
rived from gas compared with approximately 23.4 percent in Germany
and 25 percent in the United States (BP 2005). Korea, however, con-
sumes gas more extensively, relative to total energy demand, than does
Japan.

High infrastructural costs for trunk lines, regional pipes, and distri-

bution pipes are clearly one important reason that a Korean gas grid has
not proceeded faster. Political risk factors, with respect to both North
Korea and Russia, are an additional consideration with respect to piped
gas. Policy indecision has recently also been important. Nevertheless,
the infrastructural basis for future expanded gas usage in Korea is clearly
being prepared. Over the past decade, South Korea has built a network
of domestic pipelines that significantly surpasses the network in Japan,
the largest importer of LNG in the world.

As shown in

Figure 5.2,

the ROK boasts three LNG terminals and

an extensive pipeline network on its west coast, along with east-west
pipelines crisscrossing the whole of South Korea. This extensive
infrastructural development has been possible owing to the monopoly
by Korea Gas Corporation in the gas industry, enabling it to readily
construct nationwide pipelines.

In contrast with Korea, Japan does not have a systematized nation-

wide pipeline network, partly because of regulations that do not facili-
tate a pipeline distribution system nationwide. Local monopolies (which
impede the provision of gas beyond authorized company service areas)
and related pricing policies make this difficult. However, through a se-
ries of recent deregulations during the 1999–2003 period, Japanese gas
providers were allowed to sell gas beyond their service areas under cer-
tain conditions (Suzuki 2001). These developments encouraged some
interconnection among gas providers. In 2002, for example, Tokyo Gas,
Shizuoka Gas, and Teikoku Oil Company announced joint pipeline con-
struction in adjacent areas; and in the following year, Hiroshima Gas
and Fukuyama Gas announced the establishment of a construction com-
pany for joint pipelines (Hasegawa 2003).

The ROK is also pursuing more varied and ambitious uses for natu-

ral gas than is Japan. Seoul, for example, has been promoting demand
for natural gas through tax incentives, through the introduction of natu-
ral gas vehicles such as gas-powered buses, and through an expansion
of the domestic natural gas grid. These efforts have led Korean gas con-
sumption to increase both nationally (12.5 percent) and in many indi-

Korea’s Energy Insecurities

vidual sectors including industry (24.3 percent), household (7.5 per-
cent), and commercial/public (15.6 percent).

Thus, there is considerable potential for expansion in gas consump-

tion on the Korean peninsula as a whole, particularly for electric power
combined-cycle usage in the North, where overall energy consumption
remains very low. The North’s low income level cannot support exten-
sive residential use, but electric power applications appear feasible.
Expansion of gas usage for generating electric power could come either
as LNG likely supplied to South Korea from the Middle East, Southeast

29. Figures are for the respective increases between 1998 and 2001; see the

Korea Energy Economics Institute Web site that features the

Energy

Review Monthly,

www.keei.re.kr/keei/frame/eng_kerm.html.

. Gas Sales

1. Gas Sales by Sector

2. Gas Sales Growth

–

Better Energy

Better World –

4. Pipeline Network

Uijeongbu

Soae

Jungchon

Cheongju

Cheonan

Suncheon

Jungni

Busan Co-gen. Plant

Hwamyeong

Angang

Mokpo

Muan

Iksan

Chuncheon

Ilsan

Ulsan

Pohang

Gwaneum

Yeongdong

Gimcheon

Yeonsan

Osan

Anjung

Seosan

Hongseong

Daecheon

Boryeong

Gunsan

Bia

Sangi

Gwangyang

Yeosu

Gimhae

Masan

Sacheon

Yangji

Gangcheon

Hongcheon

Suwon

Pyeongchon

Bundang

Gunja

Namyangju

Yangju

Ildo

Yeongjong

Mokdong

(As of Apr. 2001)

Asan

Existing

Under Construction

Legend

South Korea’s Natural Gas Grid

Figure 5.2:

Source: Korea Gas Corporation.

Incheon
LNG Terminal

Pyeongtaek
LNG Terminal

Tongyeong
LNG Terminal

Seoul’s Energy Options for the Future

Asia, or Australia or as piped gas most likely from Russia and poten-
tially supplied to either of the Koreas or both.

The two forms of natural gas supply have very different pros and

cons, and very different sorts of infrastructural requirements. Making
the choice will thus be at once important for Korea’s energy future and
difficult. As with nuclear power, natural gas supply decisions are heavily
entwined with the resolution of the Korean nuclear crisis and will po-
tentially be influenced by its lines of resolution.

LNG.

LNG has the considerable merit of being flexibly sourced from

any part of the world. It is liquefied at source, transported worldwide in
supercooled canisters, and then gasified and transmitted to its destina-
tion within the recipient nation by pipe. The price of LNG is thus market
sensitive, although supply is usually tied to long-term contracts; it gen-
erates only very limited geopolitical leverage between producer and re-
cipient. When market and production source are more than 1,000 miles
apart, LNG economics usually win, in the view of knowledgeable
specialists.

Piped gas.

Piped gas presents a very different geoeconomic equation. It

involves much larger initial development and infrastructural costs than
does LNG, including massive long-distance construction, although the
subsequent per-unit delivery cost is relatively low. These costs can be
prohibitive over distances of several thousand miles although the cost
equation changes when tasks are undertaken by integrated industrial
groups, such as Korea’s

chaebol,

that can profit from many sides of a

commercial equation, including material and construction-equipment
supply as well as finance and product marketing. Government support,
of course, can further increase project feasibility, making pipelines an-
other topic interlinked with political discussions like the six-party talks.

Piped gas also creates a structural relationship between producer

and consumer, which ultimately can have substantial geopolitical impli-
cations. Russia, for example, has reportedly at times used the leverage
of its gas pipelines to Moldova and Ukraine to influence those coun-
tries’ elections by raising gas prices arbitrarily on strategic, politically
sensitive occasions. Diversified sourcing can reduce the impact of such
manipulation but not fully eliminate it.

Natural gas sourcing arrangements, of course, can also potentially

be a hybrid of the LNG and piped-gas paradigms discussed above. Con-
cretely, gas can be piped to an export destination, liquefied, and then
shipped worldwide. On the receiving end, there can also potentially be a

Korea’s Energy Insecurities

major piping element. When some liquefaction occurs, gas thus becomes
a more fungible commodity, diluting its strongly geopolitical flavor.
Although LNG may not yet be highly marketable in the short run, there
is an emerging spot market—currently 7 to 8 percent of global LNG
supplies—that makes LNG somewhat more flexible than piped gas.

Three Alternative Korean Energy Futures:
North Korea and Global Energy Prices as
Critical Uncertainties

Korea’s energy insecurities seem likely to continue far into the future,
but it is not so clear how Korea will respond, either in policy terms or
economic terms. Will its deep and potentially precarious dependence
on Middle Eastern oil and LNG persist? Will that fateful dependence
intensify? What of the nuclear and the piped gas options? This section
develops a typology and set of hypothetical propositions for consider-
ing these important questions.

From an energy-security point of view, the most basic imponder-

able about Korea’s energy future is what interfuel trade-offs Korea will
confront. What role will oil, coal, gas, and nuclear power play in Korea’s
energy mix? Such choices, of course, have important security implica-
tions. If oil or LNG is prominent, energy sea lanes to the Persian Gulf
will be a major concern for Korea and its allies. If piped gas is likely to
be important, political-risk issues in Northeast Asia, especially relating
to Russia and the course of Korean reunification, will loom large. If
nuclear power seems attractive and plausible, concerns about the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty will clearly demand attention, as they have
during the six-party talks. The more vital coal seems likely to be, the
more China may figure in Korea’s energy security thinking.

It is strange that few analysts have tried to understand systemati-

cally the political-economic trade-offs among energy sources that Ko-
rea confronts in coming years, or the factors that will shape Korea’s
choices. Economists suggest that such interfuel trade-offs will be in-
creasingly possible technically, throughout the world, in coming years
(Wu 1999). Such an understanding of interfuel choices is crucial to grasp-
ing the long-term political-economic significance of the ad hoc energy-
security decisions now being made in Korea and elsewhere.

Scenario analysis of how political-economic variables and interfuel

choice might interrelate needs to start with a healthy respect for the
uncertainties involved. For example, almost no one predicted the Asian
financial crisis of 1997–98, yet it produced double-digit swings in South

Seoul’s Energy Options for the Future

Korea’s GNP and energy demand during the 1997–99 period. Similarly,
few anticipated the Pyongyang summit of June 2000 or the political-
economic consequences flowing from it. Future economic growth and
energy demand oscillations—more politically contingent in Korea than
almost anywhere else in the world—could also prove volatile.

The uncertainty of future energy prices, coupled with the unsettling

likelihood that they may well oscillate between extremes, suggests the
general importance of scenario analysis in understanding how the en-
ergy future will evolve. Such scenario analysis could be especially im-
portant in the case of Korea. Broad global developments that could deeply
influence Korea’s future are chronically uncertain. Economic develop-
ments in South Korea are politically contingent to an unusual degree.
And the endogenous forces shaping Korea’s political and economic fu-
ture are also difficult to predict with confidence.

Possible Energy Options

Figure 5.3

suggests that three plausible departures from the status quo

are conceivable in Korea’s energy future. Should low energy prices re-
turn as a viable prospect, the chances are good that Korea would con-
tinue relying on the global low-cost energy supplier: the Middle East.
Conversely, should high energy prices persist, pressures will intensify
for a departure from that pattern toward greater regional diversification.

Prospects for departure from the status quo, however, are also deeply

linked to two critical uncertainties: the prospects for North-South rela-
tions within Korea, and the future of Russian energy policies. Many
scenarios for substantial change in Korea’s political status quo, ranging
from a lingering

“juche

twilight” for the current DPRK regime to full-

scale reunification of the entire Korean peninsula, are quite conceiv-
able. And Russian regulatory parameters also have uncertain aspects,
especially given the important emerging role in Northeast Asian energy
issues of the Russian company, Gazprom.

Deepened Oil Reliance?

Almost any major, sustained North-South political change would, over
the long run, mean substantially more energy demand in the North. In-
deed, the DPRK could hardly consume less than at present. More insti-
tutionalized North-South reconciliation would imply deeper overall
Korean integration with the world economy, larger capital inflows, and
hence more rapid growth for the whole peninsula.

Korea’s Energy Insecurities

Changes in the North would most likely also stimulate more North-

South trade, resulting in additional growth and energy demand in the
South as well. That energy-demand growth could well be skewed to-
ward gasoline for truck and automobile transportation, certainly to a
greater degree than at present. Taken together, emerging energy patterns
in North and South, within a more unified Korea, could thus mean even
deeper dependence on oil and on low-cost Middle Eastern suppliers of
that oil, at least until alternate Northeast Asian regional energy infra-
structure developed.

Deepened Nuclear Dependence?

A second possible departure from Korea’s energy status quo could be
strong and possibly increased nuclear dependence, as suggested in quad-
rant C of Figure 5.3. South Korea already has one of the highest levels
of nuclear dependence in the world. In actual power generation, it is the
third most heavily nuclear nation, ranking next after only France and
Sweden. More than twice the global average share of electrical power is

Predictably high

Predictably low

Energy price

Nor

th-South political-economic détente

Figure 5.3:

Korea's Interfuel Choices in Political-Economic

Context, 2005–15

Rising Russian
gas dependence?
Middle East options?

Middle East oil
and gas dependence

Strong nuclear
dependence

Status quo

Seoul’s Energy Options for the Future

provided in South Korea by nuclear power, although oil remains domi-
nant in primary energy consumption, as Figure 2.1 suggested.

Populist resistance in an increasingly democratic South Korea no

doubt clouds nuclear power’s future there to some degree. In October
1999, for example, 12 gallons of radioactive water leaked at South
Korea’s Wolsong nuclear power plant, four days after the Tokaimura
accident in Japan. Although South Korea has had no major accidents
since it began using nuclear power in 1978, this 1999 mishap was the
worst of seven relatively minor spills at Wolsong since its 1984 startup.
Polls taken after the spill showed that 62 percent of Koreans opposed
further nuclear construction, and 14 percent wanted all operating nuclear
power plants phased out.

In 2003, some 500 fishermen and environ-

mental activists staged a protest aboard 200 boats demanding that the
government cancel its plan to build a nuclear waste dump on an islet off
the coastal region of Puan County.

Should global energy prices prove to be high and should the politi-

cal status quo in North-South relations remain ambiguous or turn more
hostile once again, nuclear reliance could have a compelling logic for
Korea as a whole. This would be particularly true if North-South politi-
cal disputes prevent the realization of a trans-Korea gas pipeline. If en-
ergy prices are high and North Korean energy demand rises significantly,
nuclear reactors could provide valuable domestic energy supplies for a
North Korea otherwise lacking them. Yet the issue of nuclear reactors is
necessarily linked to the problem of transmission systems, which, in the
North Korean context, would involve massive capital costs because of
the deplorable state of the existing electric power grid.

The Natural Gas Alternative?

Natural gas is an attractive energy choice for Korea on both energy effi-
ciency and environmental grounds, as we have seen. Yet usage remains
relatively limited. Only approximately 12 percent of South Korea’s pri-
mary energy is derived from gas compared with 23.4 percent in Ger-
many and 25 percent in the United States (BP 2005), although gas usage
in the ROK is marginally higher than in Japan.

30. Nicole Gaouette, “Asia’s Nuclear Power Dilemma,”

Christian Science

Monitor,

27 October 1999.

31. “Puan Residents Stage Naval Protests,”

Korea Times,

1 August 2003.

Korea’s Energy Insecurities

There is thus considerable potential for expansion in gas consump-

tion on the Korean peninsula as a whole, especially in the North, begin-
ning with electric power generation. At this point, practically all of South
Korea’s gas currently comes in the form of LNG because of the absence
of a well-developed transnational gas grid for piped natural gas across
the expanse of Northeast Asia. Resultant Korean demand has propelled
the ROK to the standing of second-largest LNG importer in the world,
with Korea’s global import share of approximately 20 percent second
only to Japan’s.

Imported piped gas clearly could be available. Korea has massive

gas supplies virtually next door in the huge reserves of Siberia and
Sakhalin Island. The Russian Federation holds one-third of the world’s
entire proved natural gas reserves, and the vast majority of those re-
serves are concentrated far east of the Urals, in Siberia and on Sakhalin.
The reserves could be more easily accessed by pipeline than by any other
arrangement, especially if broad regional policy support were available.

Three basic pipeline options between Russia and Korea are avail-

able, as indicated in

Figure 5.4.

The simplest would run roughly 3,200

kilometers from Sakhalin Island, through the Russian Far East and North
Korea, and south along the Korean east coast toward Seoul. Japanese
interests have been discussing these reserves with the Russians since the
mid-1960s; more recently U.S. and Anglo-Dutch interests have entered
discussions (Burrows and Windrem 1994, 435). The Sakhalin route, a
central piece of the Soviet Union’s Vostok Plan of the early 1990s
(Valencia and Dorian 1998), has substantial attraction for the Russians
because it could provide important gas infrastructure to major urban
centers of the Russian Far East, such as Khabarovsk and Vladivostok,
en route. Gas to supply this route would likely flow from the Sakhalin I
project or from new ventures because Sakhalin II is already contracted
for LNG supplies, largely to Japan. The key to a Sakhalin pipeline is
passage across North Korea, without which it would not happen.

The second pipeline option, much longer and less feasible economi-

cally, could be the Kovykta route. This would prospectively link the
Kovykta gas field, northwest of Lake Baikal, to the cities of Shenyang,
Beijing, and Dalian in China and would reach Pyeongtaek in the ROK
via an underwater pipeline through the Yellow Sea. The planned gas
pipeline,

nearly 5,000 kilometers long, will provide China and Korea

32. “Gas Pipeline Expected to Be Completed on Schedule,”

FT Global News

Wire,

26 April 2004.

Seoul’s Energy Options for the Future

with 20 billion cubic meters and 10 billion cubic meters of gas, respec-
tively, and is tentatively scheduled to start flowing at the end of 2008.

The third pipeline option between Russia and Korea, and the most

attractive alternative to Sakhalin from a Korean energy-security per-
spective despite its formidable infrastructural demands, is the Sakha
Republic (Yakutia) route. Yakutia sprawls across a distance greater than
3,000 kilometers north of Korea, covering one-fifth of the vast Russian
federation (3.1 million square kilometers) but hosting a population of
only 1.3 million people. Much of Yakutia’s desolate Arctic and sub-
Arctic terrain remains unprospected and potentially promising. Russian
and Chinese firms involved in feasibility studies have had difficulty es-
tablishing feasible pipeline routes. In addition, production economics in
Korea for such long-distance gas projects would be profoundly affected
by deregulation policies in the Korean gas sector that remain unclear.

Note that two of the three basic Russia-to-Korea gas pipeline op-

tions at least consider the prospect of transiting North Korea. The ulti-
mate locus of consumption, after all, is South Korea, and the source of

0IPELINE/PTIONSIN.ORTHEAST!SIA

3OURCE.ORTHEAST!SIAN'ASAND0IPELINE&ORUMWWWNAGPFORG

33. “Russian and Chinese Companies Unable to Agree on Gas Pipeline

Route,”

FT Global News Wire,

15 January 2003.

Conclusion

Korea’s energy insecurities, as we have seen, are not straightforward
problems and cannot easily be classified as either economic or political-
military. They cut across classical standards of analysis, with the es-
sence all too often opaque and impenetrable to outsiders. Korea’s pain-
ful combination of resource deficiency and a lack of geopolitical lever-
age to command access to deficient resources is especially hard for
Americans to understand, given the abundant resources they have readily
at hand and the political-military leverage they possess to acquire re-
sources they lack.

On the economic side, the heart of Korea’s perverse energy equa-

tion is the high and rising level of local demand and the nation’s deeply
rooted difficulties in assuring adequate domestic supply, especially in
tight global markets. North and South Korea differ in virtually every
conceivable political-economic respect, yet they are strikingly similar
in the painful configurations of their common energy dilemma: they are
high-energy-use economies, with substantial heavy industrial bases, that
have virtually no local oil or gas supply. Fortunately, this common pre-
dicament gives North and South a common long-run interest in enhanced
energy supply—be it gas, nuclear power, or alternate energy. That com-
mon interest serves as a natural bridge over the bitter sea of distrust that
more than a half century of Cold War has left behind.

Domestic Policy Parameters in the ROK

Expanded energy supply will, it is hoped, be enhanced by multilateral
cooperation, possibly in the context of the six-party talks. To be sustain-

Korea’s Energy Insecurities

able, multilateral cooperation needs a coherent set of market incentives
behind it. Thus, clearer Korean government policies guiding deregula-
tion and market opening in the natural gas sector are especially crucial.
In November 1999, for example, the Korean Ministry of Commerce,
Industry, and Energy announced plans for restructuring the gas industry,
including the privatization of the Korea Gas Company (KOGAS). These
plans have not been fully implemented, however, and the precise lines
of their reformulation remain ambiguous. Clear, supportive policy
parameters with respect to natural gas will be crucial to mobilizing
private-sector support—both domestic and foreign—for ambitious gas
development programs, especially with respect to regional pipeline
development.

Security Decisions for the DPRK

Transcending economics, Korea’s energy equation has, of course, an-
other face—ironically, more easily visible outside Korea than within:
the specter of nuclear proliferation. Given North Korea’s rapid advances
in missile delivery systems during the past 15 years, the security chal-
lenges that the DPRK has long posed to the South and to U.S. forces
deployed there are now matters of intense concern to Japan, and poten-
tially to others as well. As the Northeast Asian security equation grows
more complex and regional and as bipolarity wanes in the post–Cold
War world, it is highly appropriate that a broad-based multilateral, yet
regional, security framework begin evolving in Northeast Asia, nurtured
by the six-party process. Such a framework cannot supplant America’s
core alliances with the Republic of Korea and Japan, but it can play an
increasingly important supplementary role.

In chapter 3, it was noted that energy problems loom large in North

Korea. Although food supplies are a prior issue in human terms, energy
problems constitute the largest single obstacle to the North’s healthy
economic development, especially the sort of dynamic, information-age
development on the Chinese pattern that the DPRK seems to covet. Of
greatest importance are stable energy supplies—particularly the high-
quality, stable-voltage electrical power that would allow North Korea to
increase its use of computers and other sophisticated information-man-
agement systems. It may well be, however, that North Korea’s greatest
needs are for low-profile, relatively inexpensive aid in such areas as
training and technical assistance in the development of energy planning
and resource-management capacity, together with rehabilitation in coal
supply, reduced end-use waste, and development of alternate-energy ca-

Conclusion

pacities. Whether North Korea’s leaders recognize and accept this alter-
native formulation remains unclear.

The DPRK’s announced intention, incorporated in the September

2005 Beijing framework communiqué, to abandon its military nuclear
program should be applauded. How it will be implemented, however,
remains to be seen. What is clear from these pages are the important
opportunities for a pattern of North Korean development, synergistic
in resolving the energy needs of the entire Northeast Asian region if a
meaningful six-party nuclear agreement can be achieved, observed, and
implemented.

Centrality of Electric Power

The gas, nuclear, and power-grid issues considered here—all largely
relating to electric power—could figure in a lasting resolution to the
current nuclear crisis. They are all substantively important, especially
for addressing Northeast Asia’s energy insecurities and reducing regional
energy costs. From a political standpoint, these issues crucially engage
key domestic interest groups in major prospective donor nations like
Japan and South Korea. The backing of such groups could be important
in driving forward proposals for agreement because South Korea and
Japan will likely foot the largest portion of the financial costs of an
agreement, as they did with respect to the Agreed Framework of the
1990s.

In July 2005, in what is probably the most important concrete policy

proposal on North-South energy issues since the Agreed Framework,
the ROK proposed that it would provide two gigawatts of electricity to
the DPRK, beginning in 2008. The South’s proposal should be an im-
portant and useful litmus test of Pyongyang’s intentions because the
DPRK has been consistently demanding an international solution to its
energy problems and the proposal provides concrete access to energy. If
the DPRK is truly committed to abandoning its military nuclear pro-
gram and sincerely prioritizes an efficient supply of the reliable electric
power that its economy so badly needs, it will consider this proposal
seriously.

The ROK’s July 2005 proposal differs significantly from the Agreed

Framework in that it provides for generating facilities in the ROK rather
than north of the DMZ, which is both more technically realistic than the
Agreed Framework given current conditions in the DPRK, and more
effective because it provides means of assuring that provisions of the
broader agreement under negotiation will actually be implemented. It is

Korea’s Energy Insecurities

also one of the first serious policy proposals to treat the energy prob-
lems of North and South Korea in an integrated fashion—an increas-
ingly important analytical quality going forward. If realized, the ROK
proposal could be a pivotal step toward both North-South and broader
regional confidence building. Transmission lines to be extended north-
ward to Pyongyang from the ROK could well be the first stage of a fully
refurbished regional electric power grid, should North Korea convinc-
ingly abandon its nuclear weapons program and should sufficient devel-
opment capital be available.

Technically speaking, the ROK’s proposal does not consider the

thorny issue of nuclear power generation. It does not provide for the
creation of an electric power grid to transmit secondary energy after it is
generated, a subject that the Agreed Framework of the 1990s similarly
did not address but that is a fundamental developmental issue for North-
east Asia. The Korean Ministry of Unification has also admitted that the
South Korean government does not contemplate refurbishing North
Korea’s crumbling electric power grid under the proposal.

Some revision of the proposal, including a major upward revision

in the total cost of the package, would obviously be needed in order to
make the proposed solution effective. In addition, much about the
DPRK’s commitment to abandon its military nuclear program also ob-
viously remains unclear. Thus, the ROK’s new proposal must be consid-
ered to be only one constructive step in the six-party negotiating pro-
cess, perhaps to be elaborated as the DPRK’s own sincerity in the nuclear
negotiations grows clearer.

Regional Options

There are important Middle East options, this study found, against which
Korea and the world should realistically benchmark regionalist energy
development proposals currently fashionable in the context of the six-
party talks. Middle Eastern countries can invest—and are investing—
more in Korea and are partnering with Korean firms in approaches to
China. Innovative Korean oil stockpiling policies, including the rental
of storage space to foreign producers under KNOC’s International Joint
Stockpiling Project, are also reducing the potential risks of Korea’s tra-
ditionally high Middle East dependence still further.

34. “Seoul’s Energy Carrot Looks Like Lemon,”

Korea Times,

23 July 2005.

Conclusion

This study clearly found, however, that the resolution of Korea’s

energy insecurities has an important regional dimension that transcends
the narrow economic considerations involved. Both diversification of
energy supplies and resolution of the nuclear crisis require serious at-
tention to cooperative regional energy schemes. Japan, China, and Rus-
sia, as well as the United States, have a stake in the outcome—not only
in persuading the DPRK to abandon its nuclear pretensions but also in a
Northeast Asian regional energy supply regime that increases the sup-
ply of energy available to all and broadens the distribution of that en-
ergy. The nuclear crisis can be a catalyst for regional energy develop-
ment options, especially for electric power and natural gas, that might
otherwise be less feasible.

Pivotal Role for Seoul

These regional tasks, brought to the fore by the North Korean nuclear
crisis in ways they might not otherwise have been, have global stakes.
North Korea’s nuclear proliferation is a problem for all the world, not
least because of possible links to terrorism that might someday emerge.
Similarly, Northeast Asia’s rapidly surging energy demand, led by the
massive demand expansion in China, is causing a global price spiral
that threatens stagflation many thousands of miles from Beijing itself.

To resolve these energy problems of global importance, Northeast

Asia badly needs regional, multilateral mechanisms—with U.S. partici-
pation and appropriate security safeguards—that address problems in
their full complexity. Korea, at the hub of the Northeast Asian region
and with the most to gain from stable regional interdependence, can
take a constructive lead in this and has, in fact, done so, with its two
gigawatt power supply proposal. Seoul needs to mediate in the moder-
ate, inclusive fashion that was the hallmark of Paul Henri Spaak, Jean
Monnet, and other key European leaders who were present at their
region’s active creation a half century ago.

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About the Author

Kent E. Calder is currently Director of the Reischauer Center for East
Asian Studies, and of The Korea Initiative, at the Paul H. Nitze School
of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University,
Washington, D.C. During the spring of 2005, Dr. Calder was Visiting
Professor at Seoul National University. He taught for twenty years at
Princeton University (1983–2003) and for four years at Harvard Uni-
versity (1979–83).

Dr. Calder also served as Special Adviser to the U.S. Ambassador

to Japan (1997–2001), Special Adviser to the U.S. Assistant Secretary
of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs (1997), and Japan Chair at the
Center for Strategic and International Studies (1989–93 and 1996). He
is author of four books on East Asian political economy and security:

Pacific Defense

(1996);

Strategic Capitalism

(1993);

Crisis and Com-

pensation

(1988); and

The Eastasia Edge

(1982).