Daniel Yergin is the closest thing we have to an energy seer. He runs Cambridge Energy Research Associates, and his contacts in the industry are prodigious. His book “The Prize” was a No. 1 bestseller and the basis for a PBS series. It was magisterial in its account of the rise of the oil industry, and some of that power carries over into this new book, which includes a remarkable chronicle of the rise of the Russian oil industry and of its fate in the post-Soviet free-for-all. (See, for instance, his account of Sparmurat Niyazov, the former ruler of Turkmenistan, who not only renamed the months of the year after his mother but also managed to sell the same natural gas to several foreign companies.) Yergin also tells the story of the mergers that produced the super-major oil companies and of the political calculations that have left even them small compared to the national oil and gas companies that now dominate supplies.
He covers a wide range of other fuels — there’s a particularly fine account of Adm.Hyman Rickover and the birth of America’s nuclear program — but it’s fossil fuels that mostly power both our planet and this narrative. Oil is so central to the story of our time that everything — especially our Mideast wars — is fair game. Yergin routinely moves from macro to micro: One moment you’re reading about Saddam Hussein and the next about developments in computer-aided design for oil-rig designers. It’s not the kind of book that has to labor to tell the story of the planet through some marginal commodity — say, pepper. Oil, by comparison, truly is the story of modernity.
(The Penguin Press) - ‘The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World’ by Daniel Yergin
And it’s the story of the moment, too. The most crucial part of this account comes when Yergin steps away from history and addresses the very pressing and immediate challenges that threaten to end the fossil-fuel age that has shaped our economic life for more than a century.
One key issue is peak oil, the idea that we’re running out of petroleum. The notion, now many decades old, originated with the geologist M. King Hubbert, who used a series of mathematical models to show that U.S. oil production would peak in the late 1960s. He was right in this prediction (though Yergin points out that he dramatically underestimated how much oil would be extracted by the time production peaked), which has led many to adapt his curves to global oil supplies. You’ve heard the predictions, some of them echoed by some of the most prominent energy economists and leaders: The supply of oil has reached its zenith and will now decline. Yergin says this won’t happen, for two reasons. One is that as prices rise and technologies improve, it becomes profitable to drain more oil from existing wells. The other, more important, is that with higher prices we’re able to go after brand-new sources of oil and gas, which would have been economically off-limits in earlier times. We call these new sources “unconventional” — super-deep-water drilling, the fracking of huge swaths of the countryside and the exploiting of deposits like Alberta’s tar sands. “With the passage of time,” Yergin says, “the unconventionals become, in all of their variety, one of the pillars of the world’s future petroleum supply. And they help explain why the plateau continues to recede into the horizon.”
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