Justin Dargin

Justin Dargin is one of the world's leading Middle East energy experts specializing in the Gulf energy sector and regional industrialization. He is currently a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School.
His publications include: Desert Dreams: The Quest for Arab Integration from the Arab Revolt to the GCC (forthcoming fall 2010). Dargin has appeared in major media outlets as an expert on Middle Eastern geopolitics, and his work on the Middle Eastern natural gas sector has been quoted in international and regional media such as , Al Jazeera, the International Herald Tribune, the Economist, the Associated Press, and the Middle East Economic Digest.
When Dargin worked at OPEC, one of his jobs was advising the senior staff as to the implications of several multilateral initiatives with the WTO and UN. He also worked at a Fortune 500 firm, where he structured joint ventures in emerging markets. While at OPEC, he played a role behind the accession of Angola as the organization's twelfth member, a short period after that country's disastrous civil war ended. Dargin was also a researcher at the Oxford Institute of Energy Studies in Oxford, U.K. Currently, Dargin sits on a variety of boards, he sits on the board of directors of the International Energy Foundation, on the review committee for Fulbright Scholars, is the Senior Advisor to the European Geopolitical Forum (EGF) on EU-Gulf Energy Relations and United Nations Alliance of Civilizations global energy expert.
Background
Dargin's contribution to Gulf energy research began while studying in Oxford under Professor Jonathan Stern, a leading British expert on natural gas policy. Under Stern, Dargin wrote the first study of intra-Gulf natural gas trading in the gulf through his groundbreaking work on the Dolphin Project, a natural gas pipeline from Qatar to the United Arab Emirates and Oman. Dargin was one of the first experts to correctly predict the natural gas crisis and energy shortage that the Gulf countries experienced as a result of their massive industrialization from between 2002-2008. His research in this field is part a broader understanding of how energy resources contribute to industrialization, and the link between the dual pricing of natural gas resources and economic modernization.
Dargin began the first systematic research into the development of a potential Gulf carbon trading platform. Using a wealth of evidence, he illustrated how carbon trading in the Gulf would not only be beneficial for the countries involved, but would also in a large part increase their energy efficiency-thereby preserving their natural gas for export-while generating additional revenue.
Dargin is also heavily involved in philanthropic work, and leveraged his ideas on the nexus between energy and development through his nongovernmental energy developmental organization founded to combat poverty and post-earthquake reconstruction in Haiti through building up its renewable energy infrastructure.
Writing
In his work, The Dolphin Project: The Development of a Gulf Gas Initiative, Dargin argued that the Dolphin Project served as a template for Gulf collaboration in other non-energy sectors. Dargin contended that to view the Dolphin project, as well as the Gulf Cooperation Council Interconnection Project, through the narrow lens of just energy and electricity export, was to miss the impact that these projects have on facilitating further and deeper Gulf cooperation in a variety of sectors. He cites evidence from a myriad of sectors, illustrating the political, economic and financial cooperation that must occur if projects of this magnitude are to come to fruition.
Bibliography
* The Development of a Gulf Carbon Platform: Mapping Out the Gulf Cooperation Carbon Exchange Dubai School of Gov./Harvard Kennedy School Working Paper (May 2010)
*Emerging State Centralism in the Russian Energy Sector: Precedents from the Gulf?” in Russian and CIS Relations with the Gulf Region: Current Trends in Political and Economic Dynamics: Gulf Research Center Press (ed. 2009)
* Rebuilding the Iraqi Oil Industry: Legal and Constitutional Strategies for Sustainable, Post-Saddam Development” Rebuilding Sustainable Communities in Iraq: Cambridge Scholars Press (ed. 2008)
* Qatar's Gas Revolution" The Petroleum Economist, The LNG Review (2010)
* Renewable Energy in the Gulf: Saudi Arabia and the UAE in Focus” Oil & Gas Journal (Mar. 23, 2009)
* The Islamization of Project Finance in the Gulf States” Oil and Gas Financial Journal (2009)
* The Dolphin Project: The Development of a Gulf Gas Initiative” Oxford Institute for Energy Studies(2008)
* Qatar Natural Gas: The Foreign Policy Driver” Vol. XIV Fall 2007 No. 3 Middle East Policy Journal
* Lematha Yeat’een ‘Ala ad-Douwel al-Khaleej al-Ihtemaam Bil-Karbon? (in Arabic) (Why are the Gulf Countries Interested in Carbon?) Al-Khaleej Newspaper (Sept. 1, 2009)
* Trouble In Paradise - The Widening Gulf Gas Deficit” Middle East Economic Survey (2008)
*A Model in Preparation for a Post-Oil World” The National (Mar. 20, 2009)

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