Daniel Yergin’s energy opinions amplified by national newspapers and NPR
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0263
The New York Times, National Public Radio and the Wall Street Journal – among other national media—have been spotlighting the views of Daniel Yergin on the rapid transformation of America’s energy outlook. Yergin doesn’t believe that global oil production will reach a natural peak and then suffer a decline, and does believe that world oil and natural gas production have begun shifting quickly to the Americas.
Yergin co-founded and chairs the firm IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for his book The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power .
On 20 September, the New York Times quoted him in the front-page, above-the-fold article “New Fields May Propel Americas To Top of Oil Companies’ Lists ,” which argues that for “the first time in decades, the emerging prize of global energy may be the Americas, where Western oil companies are refocusing their gaze in a rush to explore clusters of coveted oil fields.” This quotation from Yergin follows immediately:
“This is an historic shift that’s occurring, recalling the time before World War II when the US and its neighbors in the hemisphere were the world’s main source of oil. ... To some degree, we’re going to see a new rebalancing, with the Western Hemisphere moving back to self-sufficiency.”
In a nearly 8-minute-long story on Morning Edition, National Public Radio gave Yergin a chance to discuss some of what’s addressed in his new book, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World . Yergin described the sudden rise of US shale gas production, calling it “the biggest energy innovation probably in the last 30 years” but stipulating that “it has to be done in a way that is both environmentally responsible and also acceptable to the public.” He also called for national energy diversification into renewables.
The Wall Street Journal ran both a review of Yergin’s new book by Steven F. Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute and a long commentary by Yergin himself.
Hayward calls the book a “sprawling story richly textured with original material, quirky details and amusing anecdotes” that is “divided into six parts: oil, gas, electricity, climate change, renewable energy and ‘the road to the future’” He says it “begins to stray into the conventional alarmist storyline” concerning the “climate-change morass,” and that it shows but then seems to retract a “bracing ... skepticism [for] feel-good clichés about renewables.”
Yergin’s WSJ commentary appeared under the headline “There Will Be Oil” and the subheadline “For decades, advocates of ‘peak oil’ have been predicting a crisis in energy supplies. They’ve been wrong at every turn, says Daniel Yergin.” Concerning what he calls the “specter” of peak oil and the warnings of Marion King Hubbert, Yergin writes:
This is actually the fifth time in modern history that we’ve seen widespread fear that the world was running out of oil. The first was in the 1880s, when production was concentrated in Pennsylvania and it was said that no oil would be found west of the Mississippi. Then oil was found in Texas and Oklahoma. Similar fears emerged after the two world wars. And in the 1970s, it was said that the world was going to fall off the ‘oil mountain.’ But since 1978, world oil output has increased by 30%.
Just in the years 2007 to 2009, for every barrel of oil produced in the world, 1.6 barrels of new reserves were added. And other developments—from more efficient cars and advances in batteries, to shale gas and wind power—have provided reasons for greater confidence in our energy resiliency. Yet the fear of peak oil maintains its powerful grip.
In the end, says Yergin, by “2010, US oil production was 3½ times higher than Hubbert had estimated: 5.5 million barrels per day versus Hubbert’s 1971 estimate of no more than 1.5 million barrels per day.” Yergin explains that Hubbert had ‘no concept of technological change, economics or how new resource plays evolve” and that he “assumed that there could be an accurate estimate of ultimately recoverable resources, when in fact it is a constantly moving target.” Yergn continued:
The idea of “proved reserves” of oil isn’t just a physical concept, accounting for a fixed amount in the “storehouse.” It’s also an economic concept: how much can be recovered at prevailing prices. And it’s a technological concept, because advances in technology take resources that were not physically accessible and turn them into recoverable reserves.
In the oil and gas industry, technologies are constantly being developed to find new resources and to produce more—and more efficiently—from existing fields. In a typical oil field, only about 35% to 40% of the oil in place is produced using traditional methods.
Yergin reports that about a trillion barrels of oil have been produced since the 19th century and that currently it’s believed that at least five trillion barrels of petroleum resources are available in the ground, “of which 1.4 trillion are deemed technically and economically accessible enough to count as reserves (proved and probable).”
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are published in ‘Science and the media.’ He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.