The Quest

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

Main Points:

• The book is split up into 5 sections detailing Modern Oil Market, Maintaining the Supply, the Age of Electricity, Climate Change, and the Rebirth of Renewables. The Modern Oil Markets center around developments of the key choke points for world oil supply: the Bosporus, the Malacca Strait, the Strait of Hormuz, the Suez Canal, the Strait of Bab El-Mandeb, and the Danish Straits. A significant amount of attention is placed up on the New Great Game between the United States and Russia over control of key oil regions in Central Asia. Yergin notably talks about the Baku oil fields and the Kashagan fields of Kazakhstan and the roles that both US/Russia play in negotiating pipelines to move both west to the Black Sea/Mediterranean Sea or north to Moscow.
• The Age of Electricity talks about two key innovations that were critical to the development of the modern grid. First was the establishment of the financial holding company, a company that controls part of or all the interest in another company and can control utilities/generators on the ground. The other innovation was the idea of the "natural monopoly". Samuel Insull father of the large scale utility distribution network believed that there needed to be a regulatory bargain between utilities and government- in other words, the electric utility had to be a regulated monopoly where the rates and profits are determined by a public utilities commission. The first such commissions were founded in Wisconsin and New York in 1907 and were established in half of the states in America in the 1920's.
• Climate Change was not the subject of investigation initially. Several scientists like Louis Agassiz or John Tyndall investigated the recession of glaciers out of fear that an Ice Age would return. Yergin follows this history of the field with anecdotes regarding the modern renewables industry. Noting that the industry went through "the Valley of Death" in the 1980's, saw a rebirth in investment in the early 2000's, and today cleantech makes up 17% of the VC investment portfolio. 

For a great overview of the book, one can watch Dr. Daniel Yergin's lecture which was co-sponsored by the Yale Climate and Energy Institute and the Yale Center for Environmental Law&Policy.

To explore the environmental impacts of energy, competition between countries, and the shale gas revolution, watch Bill Gates interview Daniel Yergin on the latest trends in the industry.

The New York Times reviewed The Quest in 2011, calling it " necessary reading for C.E.O.’s, conservationists, lawmakers, generals, spies, tech geeks, thriller writers, ambitious terrorists and many others."