Product Description

Now with a new epilogue that speaks directly to the current energy crisis, The Prize recounts the panoramic history of the world's most important resource: oil. Daniel Yergin's timeless book chronicles the struggle for wealth and power that has surrounded oil for decades and that continues to fuel global rivalries, shake the world economy, and transform the destiny of men and nations. This updated edition categorically proves the unwavering significance of oil throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first by tracing economic and political clashes over precious "black gold."

With his far-reaching insight and in-depth research, Yergin is uniquely positioned to address the present battle over energy, which undoubtedly ranks as one of the most vital issues of our time. The canvas of his narrative history is enormous -- from the drilling of the first well in Pennsylvania through two great world wars to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Operation Desert Storm, and now both the Iraq War and climate change. The definitive work on the subject of oil, The Prize is a book of extraordinary breadth, riveting excitement, and great value -- crucial to our understanding of world politics and the economy today -- and tomorrow.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3167 in Books
• Published on: 2008-12-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 928 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781439110126
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
"Spellbinding...irresistible...monumental...must be read to understand the first thing about the role of oil in modern history."-- The New York Times

"A masterly narrative...The Prize portrays the interweaving of national and corporate interests, the conflicts and stratagems, the miscalculations, the follies, and the ironies."-- James Schlesinger, former U.S. Secretary of Defense and U.S. Secretary of Energy

"Splendid and epic history of oil.... The story is brilliantly told...with its remarkable cast of characters." -- The Wall Street Journal

"Impassioned and riveting...only in the great epics of Homer will readers regularly run into a comparable string of larger-than-life swashbucklers and statesmen, heroes and villains."-- San Francisco Examiner

About the Author
Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates and the Global Energy Expert for the CNBC business news network, is a highly respected authority on energy, international politics, and economics. Dr. Yergin received the Pulitzer Prize for the number one bestseller The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, which was also made into an eight-hour PBS/BBC series seen by 20 million people in the United States. The book has been translated into 12 languages. It also received the Eccles Prize for best book on an economic subject for a general audience.

Of Dr. Yergin's subsequent book, Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy, the Wall Street Journal said: ?No one could ask for a better account of the world's political and economic destiny since World War II.? This book has been translated into 13 languages and Dr. Yergin led the team that turned it into a six-hour PBS/BBC documentary — the major PBS television series on globalization.  The series received three Emmy nominations, a CINE Golden Eagle Award and the New York Festival's Gold World Medal for best documentary. Dr. Yergin's other books include Shattered Peace, an award-winning history of the origins of the Cold War, Russia 2010 and What It Means for the World (with Thane Gustafson), and Energy Future: The Report of the Energy Project at the Harvard Business School, which he edited with Robert Stobaugh.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Epilogue

Hardly a day goes by in which oil -- whether in terms of its price, its impact on the economy, its role in international relations and in the environment -- is not in a major newspaper story or in the television news or a hot topic on the blogs.

The questions are many. How does oil change international politics and the strategies and positions of nations? What are the political and economic risks that come with oil, and how to manage them? Is the world going to run out of oil? Or is demand going to change? How, within a single ten-year period, could oil be as low as $10 a barrel and as high as $147.27, and then within a few months drop to $63 and what is the prospect for prices? There's also the whole question of climate change. What is the future for Hydrocarbon Man?

And yet none of these questions, in their essence, is new. In one form or another, they play out again and again across the pages of The Prize. Indeed, it is hard to make sense of these questions today without understanding where they come from and how oil has come to have such a defining role in the modern world, in everything from daily life to the game of nations. From these pages readers can draw many lessons and insights that are relevant to sound energy policy, to energy security, and -- it is hoped -- to clear thinking about energy.

The competition for oil and the struggle for energy security seem to never end. And yet, with the swift victory to the Gulf War in February 1991, the strategic struggle over oil did appear to be over. The threat that a hostile power would dominate the Persian Gulf was no more. That, it now seemed, was part of a larger transformation. For the year that began with Operation Desert Storm in Iraq ended in December 1991 with Mikhail Gorbachev, president of the Soviet Union, going on Russian television to deliver a twelve-minute speech in which he announced what would have seemed almost impossible a few years earlier: the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The communist empire had collapsed, the Soviet Union had disintegrated, and the Cold War had ended. The threat of nuclear war that had hung over the planet for four decades was lifted, and a new era of peace was at hand.

Although the Soviet Union had been a significant oil exporter, its industry had been isolated behind the Iron Curtain. No longer. With the breakup of the Soviet Union, the petroleum industry of the Russian Federation and the newly independent states, notably Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, would be integrated with the global industry. Eventually, after years of wrangling, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline would link historic Baku, on the Caspian Sea, to a Turkish port on the Mediterranean -- in part, a twenty-first-century parallel to the route pioneered by the Nobels, Rothschilds, and Samuels in the late nineteenth century. This pipeline, by providing an alternative to shipping oil through the Russian pipeline system, would help to underwrite the position of those newly independent states of the former Soviet Union. When the Russian-Georgian confrontation broke out in 2008, it highlighted the security issues surrounding long-distance pipelines that cross international borders. But that would still be some years in the future.

As it was, in the early 1990s, the outcome of the Gulf War and the collapse of the Soviet Union transformed the international system. Some spoke optimistically of a new world order. The focus of the international community shifted from security to economics and growth and to what was coming to be known as globalization. In the years that followed, there was a vast expansion of international trade, as globalization led to a more open and interconnected world economy and to rising incomes in what had heretofore seemed permanently poor countries.

For most of the 1990s, oil receded as a grand strategic issue. Petroleum supplies were abundant, and prices were low. Much attention was given to the "East Asian economic miracle" and to what was beginning to appear behind it, the emerging role of China in the world economy. But, in 1997-98, Asia's economic miracle, stoked by currency flows and real estate speculation, overheated and then, beginning in Thailand, blew up. The result was a lethal contagion -- an epidemic of financial panic, bankruptcies, and defaults and a deep economic downturn that spread across much of Asia (though not China and India) and then engulfed other emerging markets, including Russia and Brazil.

The collapse in GDP led to a drop in oil demand even as oil supplies were increasing. As a result, inventory tanks filled to overflowing until there was no place to put the additional oil. Once again, as in 1986, the price of oil collapsed toward $10 a barrel and, in some cases, even lower. Oil exporters were once more thrown into economic disarray, as in 1986. The collapse in oil prices sent Russia, only in its seventh year as an independent country, into default and bankruptcy and into what turned out to be an agonizing reappraisal of its relationship with the rest of the world.

But for the oil-importing nations -- both for developed countries such as the United States, Japan and those of Europe, and for many developing countries -- the fall in oil prices was like a giant tax cut, a stimulus package that fired up economic growth. It put a lid on inflation, permitting faster growth. At the gasoline pump in the United States, it pushed prices down, in inflation-adjusted terms, to the lowest level they had ever been. This ignited a great new romance -- a passion for fuel-inefficient SUVs and other light trucks, which would soon comprise half of the new vehicles sold in the United States.

Restructuring

Low prices put great pressure on the structure of the industry. As revenues fell away, company managements struggled to find survival strategies. Budgets had to be immediately cut, and projects were either postponed or cancelled altogether. There was another way to survive as well. That was by getting bigger, gaining greater scale. The objective: to bring down costs and increase efficiency. The need for corporate scale in this environment was made more urgent because of the bigger and more complex oil and gas projects that lay ahead and the much greater financial resources that would be required to make them happen. In the 1990s, mega-projects, many of them in offshore waters, might have been defined in hundred of millions of dollars, perhaps even a billion. But the term "mega-project" would need redefining, as the industry was beginning to plan for projects in the twenty-first century that would cost $5 or even $10 billion.

All of this created the imperative for what became known as restructuring. That meant reshaping not only individual companies but the industry itself. The oil majors that the Italian tycoon Enrico Mattei had dubbed the Seven Sisters (minus Gulf, which was already gone) would be remade. The majors combined to become supermajors. BP merged with Amoco to become BPAmoco, and then merged with ARCO, and emerged as a much bigger BP. Exxon and Mobil -- once Standard Oil of New Jersey and Standard Oil of New York -- became ExxonMobil. Chevron and Texaco came together as Chevron. Conoco combined with Phillips to be ConocoPhillips. In Europe, what had once been the two separate French national champions, Total and Elf Aquitaine, plus the Belgian company Petrofina, combined to emerge as Total. Only Royal Dutch Shell, already of supermajor status on its own, remained as it was. Or, rather, it went through a self-merger. It finally did away with the complex system of two separate holding companies, Royal Dutch and Shell, run from the Hague and London, that Henri Deterding and Marcus Samuel had forged in 1907 as their grand bargain. Instead, it became a unitary company in order, among other things, to improve the efficiency of its operations and speed up decision making. With all these mergers, the landscape of the international oil industry changed.

Overall, in the late 1990s, in the minds of the wider public and many policy makers, oil faded away. So did concerns about energy security. People assumed, if they thought about it at all, that petroleum would be cheap and readily available for years to come. Instead, there were new things and "new new" things about which to get excited. Specifically, that meant the Internet, which brought the New Economy and a revolution in communications. The world would be interconnected twenty-four hours a day and distance would disappear. Information technology, start-ups, Silicon Valley, cyberspace -- those were the places to be. Few things seemed as old economy as the petroleum industry, and its relevance seemed to decline. Fewer young people were interested in pursuing jobs in the industry, which was just as well, as there were fewer jobs to pursue.

The Return of Oil

But three things in the first half of this decade were to change the picture.

The first was September 11, 2001. What had been unthinkable, and yet had been forewarned in a passing paragraph in a Presidential Daily Brief in August 2001, took place with the crashing of two hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center and a third into the Pentagon and the planned attack with a fourth on the U.S. Capitol that was aborted over Pennsylvania. For the first time since the assault on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, which had taken the United States into World War II, the United States had been attacked, and with great loss of life. The enemy was the jihadist Al-Qaeda movement.

International relations were transformed. In the autumn of 2001 -- responding to the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington -- the United States and its allies counterattacked in what became known as the war on terror. They carried the war back to Afghanistan, the base from which Al-Qaeda operated. They quickly drove the ruling Taliban, Al-Qaeda's ally, from power, and achieved what at the time seemed to be a swift victory.

Attention turned back to Iraq. The victory in the Gulf War had also been swift. But it had not been complete. Fearful of a quagmire and the risks of...

Customer Reviews

The Prize — 18 Years and Counting
Yergin's prize-winning 1991 history stretches from the first Pennsylvania oil rush in 1860 to the crash of world oil prices in 2008, and it all reads like a novel. Well, not quite. The new epilogue, which covers the period after the Gulf war in 11 pages, skims along ten times faster than the rest and feels a bit more like a history lesson. But it gives you a balanced view of recent events.

I bought it as I started researching energy. Two full bookshelves later, I can tell you, no other book in this field holds a candle to it for fascination and information. I've read complaints about what it doesn't cover so here are some alternatives, but if you want tales of the way greed, ignorance, and cleverness respond to natural wealth and, in turn, shape world history and current global politics, this is your book.

• Oil geology and exploration: Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage (New Edition).
• What to do about OPEC: Carbonomics: How to Fix the Climate and Charge It to OPEC.
• Alternatives to Oil: Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, Third Edition.
• Big Oil's power: The Tyranny of Oil: The World's Most Powerful Industry--and What We Must Do to Stop It.

There's no summarizing such a book, but this might give you an idea of the tales it tells: The 1930 discovery of the Black Giant in East Texas nearly destroyed the oil industry, sending prices down to thirteen cents a barrel. After a voluntary shutdown failed, the Governor of Texas sent the Texas Rangers in on horseback. They shut down production and sent prices back up. This led to the Texas Railroad Commission becoming the first government-organized oil cartel — a model for OPEC years later.

As an economist I really appreciate the fact that Yergin gets his economics right. This is crucial for a book about price manipulation, and it's pretty unusual. For example he understands why the Saudis tried to hold price down in 1979 and why Bush Senior flew to Saudi Arabia in 1986 to try to get them to raise the price back up! Yergen helps you understand exactly why things happen in this topsey-turvey world.

In any case, The Prize has been selling like hotcakes for 18 years. Whether you're fascinated by powerful historical forces or disgusted but intrigued by fossil fuel, you won't be disappointed.

The Oil History of the World
"The Prize" deserved its Pulitzer Prize three times over. It gives insight into history, without which, you can not understand history since the discovery of oil. This book gives history substance and excitement. In between the lines you can see the many small changes in the history of oil, each typically the work of a single person, that totally changed the history of WWII and the world as we know it. For example,Yergin shows that the history of WWII was very much determined by the availability of oil over and over again. The destruction of the Japanese in the south Pacific because their ships could not use proper tactics or go full speed for lack of oil is one example. The story of the "Henderson", a little destroyer, that was able to cripple the Japanese fleet by making it go into a defensive action that caused it to use more oil than it could afford and at the same time wipe out a cruiser was awe inspiring. The story of how the Japanese air force was largely destroyed by poor quality and inadequate fuel for training and flying was shocking. The book was long but fantastically interesting. I could hardly put it down. This is a book to be read slowly and pondered to allow the awesome magnitude of what is being said to sink in.

a real page turner
The author does a wonderful job knitting the various relevant pieces of the story together into one cohesive narrative about oil and its impact on geopolitics, in addition to the obvious industrial and economic impacts. also, the book is very clearly written and "light" and its chapters would breeze by without my notice. would highly recommend this book for anyone interested in modern history and oil geopolitics...