Daniel Yergin
Daniel Yergin
Daniel Howard Yerginis a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author, speaker, and economic researcher. Yergin is the co-founder and chairman of the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, an energy research consultancy that is now part of IHS Inc. He is best known as author of The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power and The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World. He received his PhD from Cambridge University as a Marshall Scholar...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth6 February 1947
CountryUnited States of America
Within four or five years the US might be getting 10 percent of its gasoline from ethanol - that would be like creating a new Indonesia.
We're expecting another 20 cents more than where we are,
Cycles of shortage and surplus characterize the entire history of oil.
So the major obstacle to the development of new supplies is not geology but what happens above ground: international affairs, politics, investment and technology.
We are living in a new age of energy supply anxiety.
The Russians are turning east to the Chinese - to the Europeans' surprise. It always seemed to me that the relationship between Russia and China would shift from being based in Marx and Lenin to being based in oil and gas.
People always underestimate the impact of technology. To give you an example: In the 1970s the frontier for offshore development was 200 meters, today it is 4,000 meters.
But the key thing is that Iraq, while it's got very large oil reserves, has marginalized itself as an oil exporter and these days its exports are only about one tenth that of neighboring Saudi Arabia.
But that's not enough: To maintain energy security, one needs a supply system that provides a buffer against shocks. It needs large, flexible markets. And it's important to acknowledge the fact that the entire energy supply chain needs to be protected.
The bulk of extra supplies that could be put into the market come from two places. One, they come from other Persian Gulf suppliers, of which Saudi Arabia is at the top of the list.
According to one study by the United States Geological survey, 86 percent of oil reserves in the United States are the result not of what is estimated at the time of discovery but of the revisions and additions that come with further development.
In the mid-1980s, operating problems took [nuclear] plants off-line so often that, on an annual basis, they operated at only about 55 percent of their rated total generating capacity. Today, as a result of several decades of experience and an intense focus on performance ... nuclear plants in the United States operate at over 90 percent of capacity. That improvement in operating efficiently is so significant in its impact that it can almost be seen as a new source in electric power itself.
A premium in the oil price of somewhere between 10 to 15 dollars a barrel reflects this heightened anxiety.
The North Sea was supposed to run out in the 1980s. Then in the 1990s. And now production is still on-line.