Education

    * Ph.D., International Relations, Cambridge University
    * Honorary doctorates from the University of Houston and the University of Missouri
from: http://www.gbn.com/PersonBioDisplayServlet.srv?pi=22060

Daniel Yergin is co-founder & Chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, an international consulting firm. Dr. Yergin won the Pulitzer Prize for The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power and recently published The Commanding Heights: The Battle Between Government and the Marketplace That Is Remaking the Modern World. He is a member of the Board of the US Energy Association, the National Petroleum Council, the US Energy Secretary's Advisory Board, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Dr. Yergin received a BA from Yale, a PhD from Cambridge (Marshall Scholar) and holds honorary degrees from the Universities of Houston and Missouri.
from: http://www.elawforum.com/about.adp#yergin

What is fascinating in reading Yergin's book is the extreme extent to which political history and wars during the 20th century have been driven by considerations of oil: attempts to grab oilfields, the Western dependence on American oil production (which oilfields are now greatly depleted).
from: http://www.abelard.org/news/review0407.php

from: http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1002/steigerwald.html
Oct. 15, 2002
The story of how the world "changed its mind" about governments and markets during the 20th century, "The Commanding Heights" also became a PBS series. ... I called Yergin at his offices in Washington, D.C.

Q: When war with Iraq comes, what will it do to the price of oil and what threat will it pose to world oil supplies?

A: Iraq has marginalized itself as an oil exporter, which means its exports have become much less significant than they were in past years. During the Gulf crisis in 1991, 5 million barrels a day of Kuwaiti and Iraqi oil needed to be replaced.

Today, only about a million barrels a day would need to be replaced. So the price would go up until the market decided that the alternatives were coming into the market, and then the price would come down again.

Q: Is Middle East oil still crucial to United States' security?

A: We get major supplies not only from the Middle East, but from Canada, Mexico, Venezuela. But at the end of the day, there's only one world oil market, and so if supplies are disrupted in one place it, it affects the whole market because oil easily moves around.

Q: I'm always amazed that so many people hate oil companies. My dad is always saying what a complete miracle it is that you can go up to the corner gas station and buy a gallon of gas for a $1.50. It seems like it's a pretty good deal for consumers. What do we have to complain about?

A: What strikes me about this is this kind of amazing engineering and logistical system that moves 77 million barrels of oil a day around the world. It extracts it from a well in some distant part of the world, moves it, refines it and it, eventually, gets it into a gas station and your gas tank so you can go and visit Aunt Millie.

The complexity of the oil industry and the scale of the engineering have always very much struck me. It ends up with a gallon of gasoline that usually costs $1.30 or $1.40.

Q: Speaking of technology, I presume that technology and good old human ingenuity are why we will never run out of oil?

A: You know, and you're there in Pennsylvania, some people thought we started running out of oil in the 1880s. One of the leading oil men of the day starting selling his stock in the old Standard Oil Trust because he was convinced that there was no oil outside Pennsylvania.

So we've gone through periods of shortage or perceived shortage and then new technologies and new terrains are opened and you end up with a kind of surplus and sometimes a glut.

These cycles have been true of the whole industry. I always find myself thinking, sure, it's a finite resource, and that at some point in the future we will really run into a supply constraint. Some will argue that they can see it 10 or 15 years down the road. ... Gosh. ... Maybe the man or woman on the street in their car doesn't realize what a technology industry it is. It's really run by engineers and scientists.

It's very intertwined with geopolitics and at the same time it is very literally and figuratively down to earth. It's about managing technology. And the complexity and scale of the technology that underpins the whole system is not well known.