The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

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 YerginDaniel 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 OrganizationThis 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 OilIt 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 SupplyThere'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 AgeThe 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 CarbonIs 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 EnergiesYes, 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 FutureHow 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.CONCLUSIONYou 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 a must read to understand the modern day energy complex. The breadth of topics is remarkable and after reading it one comes out with a strong appreciation of the politics, history and economics of energy. The book is quite long and is split into 6 parts each focusing on a different topic but the book comes together extremely well and one feels like they have had a comprehensive overview by the end.The author starts with the fall of the soviet union and how, among other things, low oil prices was a cause of economic strain given Russia's dependence on oil exports for foreign currency. The author describes the geology and political landscape of eastern Russia and the oil resources of the various former soviet states. The author discusses things like the petro state and discusses how Venezuela came to where it is today. The author discusses the Iraq war and the oil politics of the 90s and how the Asian crisis catalyzed consolidation in the global petro space as oil price collapse combined with growing engineering complexity required larger petro companies. The author then discusses how a decade later China growth changed the trajectory of demand substantially while supply remained relatively inelastic. In reading the first section one gets a sense of how the supply and demand side of oil have formed through time.The author moves on then to the challenges of dealing with inelastic supply with growing demand. The scramble for oil resources was a real concern as resources seemed to be depleting while new oil supplies were becoming harder and harder to come by. The author discusses the growth of gas states like Qatar which was relatively unknown and came to be an extremely important energy player as it developed its gas field and became a huge LNG exporter. The author discusses how natural gas has become a major ingredient in power generation due to the cheap cost of turbine construction as well as relatively low emission content.The author then discusses electricity and its history. He details things like the battle between Edisons DC and Tesla's AC adopted by Westinghouse. The history is really interesting and the author then discusses the growth of electricity demand and how the Nuclear reactor became a strong candidate for electricity supply. The author goes through the uranium purification process and how different purities of uranium isotopes lead to different chain reactions.The author also discusses climate change and the carbon imprint of mankind. He discusses the history of the scientific investigation of the carbon cycle and is always careful to properly give the reader the background on how the fields evolved. The author then discusses last century and how the growing appreciation of the potential for climate change and how greenhouse gases could impact the ecosystem became a key political issue. The author discusses Rio and Kyoto for example and discusses different economic solutions considered for dealing with emissions. In particular cap and trade is discussed for SO2 and carbon taxes as well. The author gives the reader some economic theory and in particular Coase's insight that cap and trade is more economically efficient than taxation. The author discusses the challenges at the global level in which domestic politics prevent global solutions and apportioning blame is difficult given the legacy issues of carbon emissions being almost solely from developed markets.The author then gives the reader and overview of the renewable space. The author discusses wind and solar and how the photo electric effect that Einstein won the Nobel prize for is at the heart of the photovoltaic effect needed for solar panels. The engineering history of solar is given as well as an understanding of how uncompetitive it was compared to regularly generated electricity. The author then gets in to how energy efficiency is an incredibly important part of the puzzle and regulatory standards over time have substantially improved our energy efficiency in things like autos.The author then moves on to discussing the new age of electric vehicles. Which as the author highlights isn't so new and was an idea that goes back over 100 years. The author gives the background of the combustion engine and the growth of the US and European auto businesses. One learns of how the current auto landscape came to be and the new directions it is taking with companies like Tesla leading the charge in EV's. The author also notes the change in user demand from light trucks to the prius and now to EVs as gas and politics have evolved.The quest is a great read as one gets an overview of so much of the energy landscape and all of the demand factors and supply factors and competing interests. Through reading it one gets a sense of the directions we might take in the future, the complexity of all of the driving factors and the lack of singular solutions to the growing need of more electricity pitted against the concerns for the environment. Its very enjoyable to read and informative throughout, Highly recommended

In contrast to his previous epic of energy, The Prize, Yergin's updated offering, The Quest, deals with a far more complex, and controversial matter, energy diversity and sustainability.The Quest begins with the familiar, and all too ubiquitous, energy source, oil. Following on from The Quest, Yergin examines the new developments within the oil industry, such as the return of Russia to the scene, the resource race around the Caspian, the rise of super majors, and the impact of conflict upon the oil market, specifically the Iraq war, and the tensions with Iran.In the following chapters, Yergin examines nuclear power, and how events such as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and most recently the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan have led to a popular and political backlash against nuclear power. The variety of renewable energy sources are examined, along with carbon neutral energy sources such as bio-mass, ethanol and natural gas. An entire chapter is devoted to the impact of climate change, although this chapter is rather familiar, and somewhat one-sided.The real strengths of The Quest are the insights given to recent developments, such as Shale Gas and the process of Fracking, and the rise of major gas powers such as Qatar. The problems such as the slowness of the move from fossil fuels to renewable energy, and the logistics and opposition such processes arouse may be entirely familiar to those who follow current affairs, however the strength of this work is that it is included within a comprehensive and wide ranging study.The conclusions may be unsurprising, namely that the current outlook of the doubling of energy consumption is unsustainable under current trends, and a diversification is necessary. The main requisite, we learn, is incentives, which is demonstrated in the case of Japan, wherein the nations lack of resources has spurned diversification and energy efficiency.Not a doomsaying or pessimistic work by any account, as a wealth of opportunity and potential is explored within its pages, pointing to a positive conclusion that energy blackout is entirely avoidable providing change is embraced.The main strength of The Quest is that it leaves no stone unturned, and no issue neglected. What one has within these pages is perhaps the widest, most inclusive, and comprehensive study of the modern world of energy, which is essential reading for all, regardless of ones familiarity with the subject.

The book is an epic saga magnificently written on the broad spectrum of energy which underpins our modern technological civilization. The book is both authoritative and riveting. The reader has constantly the feeling that the author views from a high vantage and privileged point the unfolding global panorama of energy with all its protagonists, antagonisms, geopolitics, technological evolution, the huge energy sources in the Middle East - one quarter of global oil is located in the Persian Gulf - the struggle for the Caspian sea oil, the natural gas in Qatar, the Sands oil in Canada, and Shale gas in USA. The dominance of coal, and oil, and subsequently of natural gas. The concern for climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions and as a result the quest for clean energy and the rush to renewable s like solar, wind and bio fuels.There are also many individual stories and protagonists magnificently related such as the natural monopoly in the form of the vertically integrated utility which combined generation, transmission, and distribution within the borders of a single company invented by Samuel Insull or the mega merges that unfolded between 1998 and 2002 representing the largest and most significant remaking of the structure of the international oil industry since 1911. Or major scientific breakthroughs such as the catalytic converter, which assured a thorough burn of the gasoline and thus much reduced smog-inducing emissions. By the end of the 1990s, the smog -causing emissions coming out of the tailpipe of a new car were only 1 percent of what they had been in the 1970s; 99 percent had been eliminated.And finally there are projections for the future: the cost for building the new electricity capacity the doubling of growth between 2011 and 2030 is currently estimated at $14 trillion- and rising. But that expansion is what will be required to support what could be $130 trillion economy compared to $65 trillion in 2011. And what degree can such an economy, which depends presently on carbon fuels for 80 percent of its energy,move to other diverse energy source? the answers are far from obvious.

I really enjoyed this book. It is not as dramatic and thriller-like as The Prize, but it is an excellent big picture of the energy industry in the last twenty-two years. I highly recommend to read The Prize first and then read this book.One of the many things I liked is the fact that fossil fuels are not the only options available, i.e. there are alternatives to fossil fuels and they are coming, not as quickly as we would like but they will evolve and become the norm in the future. That is one of the many conclusions that can be drawn from this wonderful book. The fact that a good part of the book is dedicated to these technologies is the best example of the aforementioned. The consequences are starting to be evident. Look in the World Bank web site [...] at the electricity consumption of the USA in the last three years versus the GDP. Although GDP has grown the electricity consumption has not. This is mainly due to energy efficiency, one of the topics mentioned in the book. Last year in the USA the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) set the standards for increasing the fuel efficiency of cars and light-duty trucks to 54.5mpg by Model Year 2025, again energy efficiency. All in all we can get a pretty good picture of the energy industry now and the possible trends in the future.This book does not tell you what the next main sources of energy will be, as the author is not an oracle, he left the door open to many possibilities and I agree with that as throughout history the business of predicting what the next "big thing" will be has been pretty awful. I particularly think there will be a mix of energy sources depending of the resources available in each region and electricity will significantly reduce the use fossil fuels for transport and mobility as it did many years ago with the lighting. There may be technologies that we do not even know now and that have not even been invented. I totally agree with what Mr. Ahmed Zaki Yamani said: "the Stone Age came to and end not for lack of stones, and the oil age will end, but no for a lack of oil." And as Mr. Bjorn Lomborg said in his book "The Skeptical Environmentalist": "We stopped using stones because bronze and iron were superior materials, and likewise we will stop using oil, when other energy technologies provide superior benefits." Just to finalise this point, the main use of oil when the first well gushed in Titusville in 1859, was for lighting purposes. I am 100% sure that few people think nowadays of using kerosene for lighting, unless they are camping in the wild and even so I have got my doubts.The oil industry has done a magnificent job in innovating and creating technologies to make the upstream and downstream oil/gas possible in places that thirty years ago were impossible, and that is also mentioned in this book. Likewise all the usual geopolitics involved in the energy industry as well as the rise of China, India, Brazil and other emerging economies that are reshaping the demand for energy. Climate change is also mentioned in a way easy to understand and mainly in a way that shows how it affects us all. I was well impressed by how the author linked the scientific breakthroughs and inventions to the energy industry, as they were the foundations of many international companies such as General Electric, Siemens, Westinghouse, First Solar, Ford, Suntech, Vestas, etc. From Thomas Edison to General Electric and Siemens, from Albert Einstein to SolarTech/Q-Cells/Suntech and so on.All in all a great book to read if you are seriously interested in the energy industry. I said seriously, because there are a lot of pages to be read... well, if you read The Prize you will read The Quest without any problem.

Firstly, i would like to say that the book arrived relatively early. As for the substantive part i have only one thing to mention, OUTSTANDING. Throughly explainable regarding energy security around the world. It gives a lot of examples and provides you the necessary theoretical background so as to deepen your understanding regarding the issues that are addressed throughout the book. Recommend it for every student, academic and every one who interested in learning about enrgy security and how it would be transform in the modern era. RECOMMEND IT.Thank you.

Everyone should read this book - politicians would learn from it, ordinary citizens would benefit from the information it contains, shareholders and market players would better understand the energy market and its ups and downs, and the world would be a better place for such knowledge being shared and understood. Another superb book by Daniel Yergin, not quite as good as his unbeatable 'The Prize' but only marginally behind. Highly recommended.