The Quest Quotes

“A lesson in bringing about true changes of mind and heart comes from a Japanese functionary. By day, he crunched numbers that showed his country was approaching imminent energy crisis and helped to craft policy. By night, he weaved a novel in which a bureaucrat-hero helps see the country through to new energy sources. When the crisis came faster than he expected, he actually put the novel away because he did not want to make the burden of his countrymen worse. When the short-term crisis passed, he published his novel. It's phenomenal and well-timed success fueled the vision that inspired difficult change and maintained a sense of urgency.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

“An important United Nations environmental conference went past 6:00 in the evening when the interpreters' contracted working conditions said they could leave. They left, abandoning the delegates unable to talk to each other in their native languages. The French head of the committee, who had insisted on speaking only in French throughout the week suddenly demonstrated the ability to speak excellent English with English-speaking delegates.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

“So often, over the history of the oil industry, it is said that technology has gone about as far as it can and that the “end of the road” for the oil industry is in sight. And then, new innovations dramatically expand capabilities. This pattern would be repeated again and again.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

“Business is about making something happen”
― Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

“The American administration warned that the Soviet Union could use dependence on its natural gas to “blackmail” the Europeans by threatening to turn off the heat and stoves in Munich.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

“The growing attention to risk was reinforced by what happened in 2004: the unanticipated jump in both Chinese and global demand for oil and the rapidly rising prices. An energy problem had already become evident in China from late 2002. But initially it was a coal and electricity problem, not an oil problem. China depends on coal for 70 percent of its total energy and about 80 percent of its electricity. The economy was growing so fast that tight supplies of coal turned into shortages. At the same time, electric power plants and the transmission network could not keep up with the demand for power. The country simply ran out of electricity. As brownouts and blackouts hit most of the provinces, a sense of crisis gripped the country.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

“The prospects for electric power in the twenty-first century can be summarized in a single word: growth. Electricity consumption, both worldwide and in the United States, has doubled since 1980. It is expected, on a global basis, to about double again by 2035. And the absolute amount of the doubling this time will be so much larger, as it is off a much larger base. An increase on such a scale is both enormous and expensive. The cost for building the new capacity to accommodate this growth between now and 2035 is currently estimated at $10 trillion—and is rising. But that expansion is what will be required to support what could be by then a $130 or $140 trillion world economy.1 Such very big numbers generate very big questions—and a fierce battle. What kind of power plants to construct and, then, how to get them built? The crux of the matter is fuel choice. Making those choices involves a complex argument over energy security and physical safety, economics, environment, carbon and climate change, values and public policy, and over the basic requirement of reliability—keeping on not just the lights but everything else in this digital age. The centrality of electricity makes the matter of fuel choice and meeting future power needs one of the most fundamental issues for the global economy.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

“In July 2000, two months after his official election, Putin met in the Kremlin with some of the rich and powerful businessmen known by then as oligarchs. He very clearly laid down the new ground rules. They could retain their assets, but they were not to cross the line to try to become kingmakers or in other ways control political outcomes. Two of the oligarchs who did not listen closely were soon in exile.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

“For many decades after the 1917 Bolshevik
Revolution, the Soviet Union had been closed off, an almost forbidden
place, another world. The Soviet oil industry operated largely in isolation,
with little of the flow of technology and equipment that was common in
the rest of the world.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

“The Soviet system had left many valuable legacies—a huge network of large industrial enterprises (though stranded in the 1960s in terms of technology); a vast military machine; and an extraordinary reservoir of scientific, mathematical, and technical talent, although disconnected from a commercial economy. The highly capable oil industry was burdened with an ageing infrastructure. Below ground lay all the enormous riches in the form of petroleum and other raw materials that Gorbachev had cited in his farewell address”
― Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

“would go up the learning curve only once.” These”
― Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

“resented”
― Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

“The ISI, the Pakistani security services, was sponsoring the Taliban to pursue what it saw as Pakistan’s own strategic interests—in particular, as a Pashtun buffer against what they feared would be an India-dominated government in Kabul.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

“The gas project was particularly compelling to some policymakers in India, who hoped that a natural gas link would tie India and Pakistan together with common interests that would help to off-set decades of conflict and rivalry. They called it a “peace pipeline.” To say the project was “challenging” was an understatement.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

“The complex systems that produce and deliver energy are among the most critical of all the “critical infrastructures,” and that makes their digital controls tempting targets for cyberattacks.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

“Currently, oil use in the developed world averages 14 barrels per person per year. In the developing world, it is only 3 barrels per person. How will the world cope when billions of people go from 3 barrels to 6 barrels per person?”
― Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

“Currently, oil use in the developed world averages 14 barrels per person per year. In the developing world, it is only 3 barrels per person.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

“North America’s natural gas base, now estimated at 3,000 trillion cubic feet, could provide for current levels of consumption for over a hundred years—plus.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

“Shale gas was proving to be cheaper than conventional natural gas. In 2000 shale was just 1 percent of natural gas supply. By 2011 it was 25 percent, and within two decades it could reach 50 percent.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

“You know what I’ll say to the first person in our company who comes to us with a proposal to invest a billion dollars in Iraq?” asked the CEO of one of the supermajors a month before the war. “I’ll say, ‘Tell us about the legal system, tell us about the political system. Tell us about the economic system and about the contractual and fiscal systems, and tell us about arbitration. And tell us about security, and tell us about the evolution of the political system. Tell us all those things, and then we’ll talk about whether we’re going to invest or not.’”9”
― Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

“If the “oil sands” were an independent country, they would be the largest single source of U.S. crude oil imports.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World