Daniel Yergin Quotes.
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.
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 starting point for energy security today as it has always been is diversification of supplies and sources.
A premium in the oil price of somewhere between 10 to 15 dollars a barrel reflects this heightened anxiety.
Cycles of shortage and surplus characterize the entire history of oil.
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.
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.
We experienced similar fears in the 1880s, at the end of World War I and II. And we ran out in the 1970s.
The world has produced about 1 trillion barrels of oil since the start of the industry in the nineteenth century. Currently, it is thought that there are at least 5 trillion barrels of petroleum resources, of which 1.4 trillion is sufficiently developed and technically and economically accessible.
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.
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.
It’s extraordinary how inventive one can be with ethanol right now.
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.
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.
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.
