Sarah Emerson
President ESAI, Principal, ESAI Energy LLC
Sarah Emerson joined ESAI when the petroleum consulting practice was launched in 1986. She is currently President of ESAI and a principal in ESAI Energy, LLC, which conducts research and consulting on global petroleum and liquid fuels markets.
As director of ESAI’s petroleum and alternative fuels practice, Ms. Emerson has developed many of ESAI’s unique analytical tools for assessing the oil market and forecasting oil prices. In addition, she has supervised the development of an empirical source database of monthly oil data that cover the period January 1978 to present for every country in the world with particular focus on non-OECD countries. More broadly, she has conducted several industry studies on a diverse range of topics, such as the transfer of pollution in energy trade, the profitability of Asian refining, the future of the Asian bitumen market, petroleum product markets in the Indian Ocean, Strategic Petroleum Reserves, the outlook for global automotive fuel markets, GHG Emissions from gasoline and diesel production, and the future of the Russian refining industry. In 1992, she published the first description ever available in the West of the Russian refining sector.
In addition to her market analysis and forecasting activities, Ms. Emerson is an expert witness in energy sector litigation, an adviser to the U.S. and Japanese governments on energy security issues, and a reader/commenter for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report. She regularly publishes articles in the energy trade press, and is frequently quoted in the press and interviewed on television.
Ms. Emerson is a member of the President’s Council for Cornell Women at Cornell University. She was a 2004 Key Women in Energy Honoree. In 2004 and 2005, she was the Repsol-YPF Senior Fellow at the Center of Business and Government at Harvard University where she conducted research on the oil markets and energy policy. She received her B.A. from Cornell University and her M.A. from the Johns Hopkins University Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.