The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

"This book was also reissued recently. The new edition is by no means as extensively rewritten as Vaclav Smil’s book, but it is a wonderfully readable history of the development of the oil age: how the world came from a point where if you had energy it was either biomass—that is wood—or coal, to a point where oil was the dominant source of energy. It was probably never more than fifty percent of total energy worldwide but it has been the most traded energy commodity and it changed the nature of geopolitics over the course of a hundred years from around 1890 to late in the twentieth century. It’s only the rise of shale oil in the US that has reduced crude oil’s central role in world politics. And a lot about the characters of the people who were the developers of oil in the early days. There’s a fascinating chapter in this book about John D. Rockefeller and how he differed from the conventional entrepreneur. We would think of someone like Rockefeller as probably good at running oil rigs and drilling them quickly and selecting the right areas, but what he was was actually an exceptional manager. His success came more from monopolising the means of transport of oil than from the extraction of oil in the first place. That is, the development of the Standard Oil trust in the latter half of the nineteenth century was more to do with monopolising oil transport on the railways than it was about owning a large fraction of total oil production capacity. No, not at all. Yergin’s view, I think it’s fair to say, is very similar to Smil’s. His company Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) has published or used some of Smil’s work. These are people who are committed to the view that oil and other fossil fuels are utterly central to modern life and that we really can’t do without them. The recently written epilogue in here is only twelve pages long and not a lot has been changed, I suspect, since the first edition. There’s not much about the future of oil and how the world of energy might be different from the past but I suspect that Yergin sides with Smil in thinking that the transition away from carbon fuels is going to be very slow indeed. I suspect he thinks there is no carbon bubble. I sincerely hope he is wrong. No, and I think the reason there is that renewable energies do not lend themselves naturally — or are not thought to lend themselves naturally — to exploitation by big, centralised, multinational behemoths. What we’re seeing is the development, I suspect, of a much more decentralised energy system which isn’t reliant on huge oilfields or enormous coalfields generating many, many terawatt hours of energy. The move is towards both digitalisation — so that things can be controlled centrally but can happen locally — but also there are going to be vastly more places where energy is collected than there are at the moment. These first two books are about the mining of energy and what the world will have to do is to move to the point where we farm energy. That transition has only really just begun, but that’s the nature of the challenge that we face."