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
Even Silicon Valley investors have put well over a $1 billion in new energy technologies.
Clearly, the Chinese need the resources, but I don't think they want to clash with the industrial world which happens to be the market for their goods.
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.
In a couple of years, the Chinese will be seen as regular participants in international industry. Their companies have to report to shareholders as well as to the Chinese authorities. They need to make money, they have to be efficient.
The North Sea was supposed to run out in the 1980s. Then in the 1990s. And now production is still on-line.
A premium in the oil price of somewhere between 10 to 15 dollars a barrel reflects this heightened 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.
We are living in a new age of energy supply anxiety.
An important United Nations environmental conference went past 6:00 in the evening when the interpreters' contracted working conditions said they could leave. They left, abandoning the delegates unable to talk to each other in their native languages. The French head of the committee, who had insisted on speaking only in French throughout the week suddenly demonstrated the ability to speak excellent English with English-speaking delegates.
In a world of increasing interdependence, energy security will depend much on how countries manage their relations with one another. That is why energy security will be one of the main challenges of foreign policy in the years ahead. Oil and gas have always been political commodities.
To meet the energy challenge requires the most important energy of all - human creativity. That's the real prize.
So the major obstacle to the development of new supplies is not geology but what happens above ground: international affairs, politics, investment and technology.
Cycles of shortage and surplus characterize the entire history of oil.
The other are the strategic, so-called strategic stocks that the United States and the other Western industrial countries have, which could put in as much as four million barrels a day of oil into the market pretty quickly.