The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World [Format Kindle]

Writing massive 700 page historical epics is never an easy task. It requires deep research, broad vision, and great intellectual fortitude. Daniel Yergin demonstrated all of these in his first book, the classic Pulitzer Prize winner, The Prize. Although The Quest is an informative book in its own right, I came away disappointed with some aspects of it. The publishers billed The Quest as the sequel to The Prize. In the first part of the book, Yergin does try to pick up with the grand historical narrative that he left off twenty years ago. This is probably the most successful part of the book. But after devoting roughly 200 pages to this effort, The Quest turns into a series of long vignettes covering topics that Yergin, despite his formidable expertise, never manages to quite tie together.

The five subsequent parts cover: energy security and the future of oil supply, the development and evolution of electric power, the study of climate change and its relationship to energy, the emergence of new energies and renewables, and transportation and the automobile. To say these parts of the book are informative would be an understatement. Yergin has a unique expertise on this topic that few other scholars can match. But in The Quest Yergin can't seem to muster the vision and artistry to unite his coverage of these issues into a more meaningful whole.

Politically, The Quest is a very cautious book. At times, Yergin verges on becoming a lackey for the big oil companies with which he has likely developed ties as the director of a respected energy consulting firm. He tends to be far more critical of those who have challenged big oil than he is of BP, Exxon and the other corporate goliaths that dominate the industry. He is particularly dismissive of "peak oil" theory, whose leading exponent, Marrion Hubbert, he views as the latest in a long line of wrong-headed thinkers who have predicted that energy supplies would run out. Yet the verdict is still out on this issue. Yergin has proven wrong in the past when he predicted that oil prices would drop. And critics have pointed out that even if oil production has not peaked, it is possible that oil exports have. Thus the West will still be faced with a shortage.

While fiercely criticizing Hubbert and other opponents of big oil, Yergin does not really use his own contacts in the energy industry to tell us very much about what has been going on inside the individual companies. The BP oil spill and the Enron scandal, two events which critics of the industry would doubtless see as germane here are given scant attention. Even the 5 star reviews of this book on Amazon acknowledge Yergin's failure on this point as does Fareed Zakaria's review in the New York Times. This failure may not bother all readers but I personally believe that scholars have an obligation to speak truth to power. Yergin was in a position to do this but, in the end, he did not.

The research for The Quest can be quite thin in places. There are fewer footnotes than one would expect from a 700 page book and many of the sources cited are newspaper articles and secondary source materials. To be fair, there were probably not many archival materials that Yergin could have used for a book on such a recent topic. And Yergin does seem to have conducted interviews with some relevant people in the industry. But he doesn't uncover a lot of new sources or introduce us to any exciting new revelations.

Stylistically, The Quest is a bit choppy in its exposition. Each of the chapters is divided into sections, which are sometimes as short as one paragraph. Again, this gives the book more of a report like feel than the novelistic feel that contributes so greatly to the success of The Prize. Yergin's prose gets his points across simply and effectively but not very elegantly. And elegance would be nice given the amount of time reading this book demands.

Despite my criticisms, Yergin's book may still be worth reading for those with a deep interest in the field. The author remains one of the foremost experts on the subject in the country. Ultimately, however, I cannot help but feel that The Quest could have been much more if the author had been more daring and paid greater attention to research and writing.

We all live fast paced and complex lives. If you are a reader then the key choice you must master is what to read. There is simply too much out there, and you cannot absorb it all. Every now and then a book comes along which is the equivalent of a precious diamond. It is so full of information, presented in such an interesting way that you can't bring yourself to put it down. You couple this characteristic with an author who is a major thinker and what you have when you put it all together is a 1 in a 100 type book. This is a book that changes everything we know about energy.

This is Daniel Yergin

Daniel Yergin is such an author, and this is such a book. It has now been two decades since the he turned the world upside down with his Pulitzer Prize winning "The Prize - The Epic Quest for Oil". To have read it is to understand the world. Its monumental impact affected our economy and Wall Street. In the last few years it became apparent that The Prize needed a badly needed update, not just a chapter added. Instead of completely revamping The Prize, Yergin did one better, he chose to write on the world of energy in general and then incorporate revisions from his previous writings which were necessary. This brings us to "The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World".

We live in world that currently creates $65 trillion per year in gross production of goods and services. Our country does close to $15 trillion of this production, while Europe as a whole does slightly more. Within 20 years the world is expected to produce $130 trillion, that's a doubling in just 2 decades. Now here's the problem as laid out in the book. Yergin clearly spells out that in the developed world today we use about 14 barrels of oil per person per year. In the developing countries we use about 3 barrels per person per year. What are we going to do when gross world production goes from $65 trillion to $130 trillion; energy needs must expand along with economic production?

Oil, coal, and natural gas currently provide 80% of the world's energy needs. It is the thesis of the book that these three sources of energy combined, cannot suffice to answer our energy needs. Yes there is more of each of these sources than previously thought available. As an example, today we produce 5 times the amount of oil than we did in 1957, a remarkable increase, but what is coming down the pike is a need to expand energy to extraordinary levels.

The Book's Organization

This is a relatively long book composed of 711 pages of narrative without a boring sentence in the entire book. It reads fast in spite of its length. There are 16 pages of bibliography and this bibliography is a useful one if you want to explore this topic further. You will then find 34 pages of footnotes, and I like the footnotes being in the back of the book in this case, as opposed to the end of the chapters as you see in other books. Yergin has given us six parts to ponder in this story of how we will solve our energy problems.

PART I - The New World of Oil

It is in this chapter that the author covers the return of Russia as an energy power. The world is a changing place and Russia has become an energy powerhouse with its abundant oil and gas resources. Yergin also covers the war in Iraq and the rise of China in this part. China's needs will eclipse our own as their economy continues to rapidly expand. The beauty of a book like this is that you are not only learning about the energy world, but the world in general. It is a fascinating journey as we find out about the emerging superpowers and whether or not America can continue to hold onto economic dominance in a rapidly changing world.

PART II - Securing the Supply

There's more than one reason why America spends close to $800 billion on defense spending. You have to keep the sea lanes safe for oil and energy transport. Without world trade, America would rapidly sink into a depression since international trade makes up 25% of our Gross Domestic product. In this section the author gives you a thorough survey of what it means to run out of energy including oil and natural gas.

PART III - The ELECTRIC Age

The book makes clear that we may be living in the post industrial age, or the information society, but in terms of energy we are still living in the OBSOLETE Fossil Age, and it has to change. The Electric age is coming to an end, and in this section Yergin tells us the pros and cons of what is coming. You are not getting theories from talking heads. This is the preeminent expert on oil and energy in the world today. Corporations and governments pay a fortune to consult with the author with regard to what he thinks is coming next.

PART IV - Climate and Carbon

Is there glacial change? Is the earth getting warmer? What is the effect of climate change on man's need for more energy? Where will it come from and can we afford it? Is the internal combustion engine now more than a century old reaching the end of its operational efficiency? Must we go another way? The average SUV weighs 5000 pounds and is being driven around town half the time by soccer moms driving alone? How much longer can we keep the whole process going, and is it changing right before our eyes?

PART V - New Energies

Yes, there are new sources of energy coming. We are going to see wind turbines everywhere, but there is also a 5th source of energy coming. Perhaps it is already here and that is EFFICIENCY. We must get more out of the energy we already have. When Exxon moves oil crude from a pipeline to tanker there is less than one teaspoon of oil that is lost in the process. We must become more efficient as a society and as a world, and we must close the conservation gap, which we haven't even begun to tackle yet.

PART VI - Road to the Future

How interesting that in the last part of this book the author chooses to deal with what he calls carbohydrate man, and the great electric car experiment. Would you believe that only about 20% of the energy that comes out of the internal combustion engine is efficiently used in the running of a car. The rest comes out of the muffler into the air as heat and lost energy. With electric cars, the efficiency approaches 85%? Batteries are still too heavy however, and they do not last as long as they should. We haven't even discussed how costly they are to replace. Nevertheless, the electric car is in our future, and this book tells you the whole story.

CONCLUSION

You are going to love this book, all 700 plus pages of it. Nobody tells a more exciting story than Daniel Yergin. To win a Pulitzer Prize you must grip the reader's attention and never let go from beginning to end, and that is precisely what we have here. It is a non-fiction book that reads like a spy thriller and a reader can't expect more from a book, especially one on the topic of energy.

I urge you to read anything this man writes. It is rare that Yergin publishes and everything he says has power and relevance attached to it. My only reading wish is to find more books in the same class as "The Quest". Such books are rare unfortunately, and when you find them, we have to let our friends and other readers know. I thank you for reading this review.

Richard C. Stoyeck

The Quest" is an 804-page up-to-date sequel to energy-consultant Yergin's earlier best-selling, Pulitzer winning "The Prize." Topics covered include the Soviet Union's breakup, Japan's recent earthquake and tsunami, major mergers in the oil industry, Iraq War II, China's growth in energy demand, peak oil, a nuclear Iran, the 'Dutch disease, and how energy production and distribution is vulnerable to cyber warfare. Yergin also criticizes California's deregulation of electricity that created shortages, and Marion Hubbert for his 'peak-oil' theorizing.

A side benefit of "The Quest" is that it also provides important insights on related issues. For example, readers learn that the Arab oil embargo and 1973 October War helped sustain the Soviet Union via their associated quadrupling of oil prices - Russia's main source of hard currency. (Prior to the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union, it was the world's #1 oil producer; it now has returned to that position.) At the time of the breakup they were having difficulty even feeding children in major cities - thus, the popular story that it was Reagan's defense buildup that broke their economic back (denied by Gorbachev) probably isn't true. Regardless, such heavy reliance on natural resources probably also 'infected' the Soviets then (Russia today) with the so-called 'Dutch disease' in which other economic areas remain weak and undeveloped. Yergin also illustrates how the Dutch disease infected Nigeria and Venezuela as well. Conversely, China had no such richness of natural resources, and that probably helped push it towards the broad range of competencies it has achieved. One also learns important details of how the Russian oligarchs came about, and the subsequent feuding of some with Putin that led to their downfall. Readers also learn that early users of solar photovoltaics were indoor marijuana growers trying to hide their heavy electricity use, and receive a short compendium of major mistakes made on both sides prior to and after initial Iraq War II combat.

The 'bad news' about Yergin's book is that it sometimes leaves out important and interesting details, and superficially treats global warming, energy efficiency, and renewable energy sources.