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
The world oil market is in the grip of a slow motion supply shock.
This has been pointed out ... even in thrillers.
This is a long-lead-time business; the investment horizon is five, 10 or 20 years. There's no switch to pull.
A more relevant description would be a plateau in production capacity that might be reached in the fourth or fifth decade of this century.
All the tensions and stress in the world's oil markets are flowing into the gasoline pump. The crude oil market is very tight, and a market that's this tight is vulnerable to politics, to hurricanes, to strikes and to emotions, and that's what we're seeing.
The last time before this time was in the 1970s, when people thought we were going to fall off the oil mountain and live in an age of permanent shortage. Since then, world supplies have increased 60 percent. I don't see why we're at the end of technology now, or why it would be finished now.
We experienced similiar fears in the 1880s, at the end of World War I and II. And we ran out in the 1970s.
This has a lot to do with the unrest in Nigeria, but also with the production loss after the hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, the decline in Iraq since the 2003 war, and the decline in Venezuelan output since 2002.