"A premium in the oil price of somewhere between 10 to 15 dollars a barrel reflects this heightened anxiety." -- Daniel Yergin
Daniel H. Yergin (born February 6, 1947) is an American author, speaker, and economic researcher. Yergin is the co-founder and chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, an energy research consultancy. It was acquired by IHS Energy in 2004.
Born in Los Angeles, California to a Chicago Tribune reporter father and a mother who was a sculptor and painter, Yergin attended Beverly Hills High School. He received his B.A. from Yale University in 1968, where he served on the board of the Yale Daily News, and was a founder of The New Journal. He earned his Ph.D. in International Relations (1974) from Cambridge University where he was a Marshall Scholar. He also holds an honorary doctoral degree (1994) from the University of Houston.
Yergin's first major book, Shattered Peace, was a moderately 'revisionist' account of the origins of the Cold War that attributed it chiefly to "tragic misconceptions" on the part of American policymakers who, in the post-World War II years, embraced the "Riga axioms" of George F. Kennan, Loy W. Henderson, Charles E. Bohlen, and Elbridge Durbow rather than the "Yalta axioms" of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Shattered Peace was based on Yergin's Ph.D. dissertation.
Daniel Yergin is best known for The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, a number-one bestseller that won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1992. The book was adapted into a PBS mini-series seen by more than 20 million viewers. Yergin was awarded the 1997 United States Energy Award for "lifelong achievements in energy and the promotion of international understanding." According to a biographical note in the March/April 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs, Yergin is currently at work on "a new book on oil and geopolitics."
Daniel Yergin also wrote and hosted a PBS production called "The Battle for the World Economy," based upon his book of the same name. This 3-part television production was a documentary about the economic history of the 20th century. Yergin interviewed many high profile people such as Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and Robert Rubin, as well as economists such as John Kenneth Galbraith, Milton Friedman, and Jeffrey Sachs. The series presented economic history as a battle between centralized command economies and free market economies.
"But eventually it's a question of access: Getting access to fields is on top of the oil companies' agenda. We see a substantial build-up of supply occurring over the coming years.""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.""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.""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.""Cycles of shortage and surplus characterize the entire history of oil.""Even Silicon Valley investors have put well over a $1 billion in new energy technologies.""First, we have to find a common vocabulary for energy security. This notion has a radically different meaning for different people. For Americans it is a geopolitical question. For the Europeans right now it is very much focused on the dependence on imported natural gas.""I think the producers, for the most part, don't want to see prices skyrocket because that will only create problems for them down the road and would also be a, you know, would be a very serious shock for a world economy that can't afford serious shocks right now.""If a war started, the oil price probably would go up, as you said, maybe $5, $6 a barrel until you saw other oil from the extra supplies that are available elsewhere coming into the world, into the market.""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.""It's extraordinary how inventive one can be with ethanol right now.""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.""So the major obstacle to the development of new supplies is not geology but what happens above ground: international affairs, politics, investment and technology.""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.""The North Sea was supposed to run out in the 1980s. Then in the 1990s. And now production is still on-line.""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.""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.""The starting point for energy security today as it has always been is diversification of supplies and sources.""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.""We are living in a different world now. You can see it everywhere in international relations: It was noteworthy that, after his visit to Washington, the Chinese president's next stop was Saudi Arabia.""We are living in a new age of energy supply anxiety.""We experienced similiar fears in the 1880s, at the end of World War I and II. And we ran out in the 1970s."
The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. Reprints: Penguin, 1978, 1980, ISBN 0-395-27267-X; Penguin, rev. & updated, 1990, ISBN 0-14-012177-3.
The Dependence Dilemma (Harvard Studies in International Affairs 43): Gasoline Consumption and America's Security. University Press of America, 1980. ISBN 0-87674-047-6. Reprint: Rowman & Littlefield, 1984, ISBN 0-8191-4056-2.
1989 Fuels report hearing on the oil price forecast and scenario planning (CEC contract). Cambridge Energy Research Associates, 1989.
The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Cambridge Energy Research Associates, 1990.
The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. ISBN 0-671-50248-4. Reprint: Simon & Schuster, 1992, ISBN 0-671-79932-0.
Gasoline and the American People. Cambridge Energy Research Associates, 1991.
The Euro: Remaking Europe's Future: The New Europe poses enormous challenges — for the welfare state, for companies, and for political leaders. Cambridge Energy Associates, 1998.
Energy Future: The Report of the Energy Project at the Harvard Business School. New York: Random House, 1979. ISBN 0-394-50163-2. Reprints: Ballantine Books, ISBN 0-394-29349-5; Knopf, 3rd ed., 1982, ISBN 0-394-71063-0; Random House, new revised 3rd ed., 1990. [With Robert B. Stobaugh.]
A Strategy for Energy and Economic Renewal. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1982. ISBN 0-395-30517-9. Reprint: Viking Penguin Books, 1983, ISBN 0-14-006752-3. [With Martin Hillenbrand.]
And What It Means for the World. New York: Random House, 1993. ISBN 0-679-42995-6. Reprint: Vintage, 1995, ISBN 0679759220 }. [With Thane Gustafson.]
The Battle for the World Economy. Revised, retitled, and updated ed. New York: Free Press, 2002. ISBN 0-684-83569-X. (Original edition, entitled: The Commanding Heights: The Battle Between Government and the Marketplace That Is Remaking the Modern World: New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998; ISBN 0-684-82975-4.) [With Joseph A. Stanislaw.]
Global Energy: Challenges and Priorities (Foreign Affairs Editors' Choice). Council on Foreign Relations Press, 2001. ISBN 0-87609-305-5. [With Amory Lovins and Dennis Eklof.]