IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wbk/wbrwps/8231.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

How much oil is the Islamic state group producing ? evidence from remote sensing

Author

Listed:
  • Do,Quy-Toan
  • Shapiro,Jacob N.
  • Elvidge,Christopher D.
  • Abdel Jelil,Mohamed
  • Ahn,Daniel P.
  • Baugh,Kimberly
  • Hansen-Lewis,Jamie Nicole
  • Zhizhin,Mikhail

Abstract

Accurately measuring oil production in low-governance contexts is an important task. Many terrorist organizations and insurgencies -- including the Islamic State group, also known as ISIL/ISIS or Daesh -- tap oil as a revenue source. Understanding spatial and temporal variation in production in their territory can help address such threats by providing near real-time monitoring of their revenue streams, helping to assess long-term economic potential, and informing reconstruction strategies. More broadly, remotely measuring extractive industry activity in conflict-affected areas and other regions without reliable administrative data can support a broad range of public policy decisions and academic research. This paper uses satellite multi-spectral imaging and ground-truth pre-war output data to effectively construct a real-time day-to-day census of oil production in areas controlled by the terrorist group. The estimates of production levels were approximately 56,000 barrels per day (bpd) from July-December 2014, drop to an average of 35,000 bpd throughout 2015, before dropping further to approximately 16,000 bpd in 2016.

Suggested Citation

  • Do,Quy-Toan & Shapiro,Jacob N. & Elvidge,Christopher D. & Abdel Jelil,Mohamed & Ahn,Daniel P. & Baugh,Kimberly & Hansen-Lewis,Jamie Nicole & Zhizhin,Mikhail, 2017. "How much oil is the Islamic state group producing ? evidence from remote sensing," Policy Research Working Paper Series 8231, The World Bank.
    • Handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:8231
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/239611509455488520/pdf/WPS8231.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hamidzadeh, Zeinab & Sattari, Sourena & Soltanieh, Mohammad & Vatani, Ali, 2020. "Development of a multi-objective decision-making model to recover flare gases in a multi flare gases zone," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 203(C).
    2. Christiana Parreira, 2021. "Power politics: Armed non-state actors and the capture of public electricity in post-invasion Baghdad," Journal of Peace Research, Peace Research Institute Oslo, vol. 58(4), pages 749-762, July.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Conflict and Fragile States;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:8231. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Roula I. Yazigi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dvewbus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.