Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations, by Daniel Yergin, 2020
Informative book. Learned that we’ve gone from being worried about running out of oil to being a major exporter of it, mainly as Liquid Natural Gas (LNG). We are one of the big 3 oil producers: USA, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. Also learned that fracking is not so bad – it is the reason we’ve become energy independent and the top oil producer in the world (as of Autumn 2018). Pipelines are not so bad – they move oil and natural gas much more easily – saves tons of trains and trucks. Also learned that Russia and China are friends now. Putin gives birthday presents to Xi Jinping. Also learned that renewables require tons of resources and minerals just to make a windmill or a battery. As Wayne says, there is no free lunch. Everything has a cost.
Well written but a few typos (I think because it was published in 2020 and so much happened with the COVID-19 pandemic that probably had to be researched and added at the last minute). This book is full of information, history, science, technology, fun facts. It is apolitical; he simply states what politicians say and do and once in awhile, will point out failures in logic and faulty reasoning.
I read all 46 chapters (430 pages) EXCEPT I could not finish the chapters on the Middle East. The Middle East is one confusing quagmire of history and current affairs. He includes history and facts on energy throughout the world but mainly in the USA, Russia, China, and the Middle East. Then, he talks about climate change and new technologies and renewables: much detail on electric vehicles, wind and solar. Learned that wind and solar have developed into much more viable alternatives but there are still some warts to work out. He didn’t say much about the future of nuclear, unfortunately. He did say it is the cleanest way to generate power. In Chapter 44, Breakthrough Technologies, he writes:
A new study, Advancing the Landscape of Clean Energy Innovation, led by Moniz and myself, conducted for the Gates Foundation and the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, identified twenty-three technologies with “highest breakthrough potential.” They fall into several areas: Storage and battery technology for the intermittency that bedevils large-scale use of wind and solar. Advanced reactors and a new generation of small reactors that would revitalize carbon-free nuclear power. Today, there are more than sixty advanced private-sector nuclear research projects in the United States.
Hydrogen had its false starts almost two decades ago with the hydrogen “freedom car” and a “hydrogen highway” in California. But a renewed focus has emerged on hydrogen to substitute for natural gas in heating and for fuel cells as an alternative to electric vehicles.
from Chapter 44, page 403
He gives details on shale oil (fracking); it’s history and current state. Here are some quotes:
Shale has generated not only revenues but also environmental controversy and opposition as it grew. As with most major industrial activities, environmental issues around shale need to be properly managed. In the early years of the shale revolution, the controversy was particularly focused on water contamination, either from the fracking process itself or the disposal of wastewater that comes out of the well. A decade later, as Daniel Raimi observes in his book The Fracking Debate, water contamination has proved not to be the systemic problem that some feared. To begin with, the fracturing itself takes places several thousand feet below freshwater aquifers. There was also the view that shale was a “wild west” activity. But shale production, as with the rest of the oil and gas business, is highly regulated, in this case primarily at the state level. Some states needed time to ramp up their regulatory apparatus as shale development became significant in their area. Earthquakes were nother concern, particularly after swarms were felt in Oklahoma. Follow-on studies attributed these quakes not to driling but rather to disposing of wastewater in inappropriate locations, causing slippage of rock formations and thus quakes. With new regulation of where wastewater could be disposed and at what pressure, the number of earthquakes fell sharply…
The most significant question today concerns “fugitive” methane emissions–basically, natural gas leaking from equipment or pipelines–which is not limited to shale. The Environmental Defense Fund was among those at the forefront in directing attention to methane as a significant greenhouse gas. Reducing those emissions is now a priority for both regulators and industry and a particular focus of the thirteen-company Oil and Gas Climate Initiative. Moreover, the International Energy Agency notes, “Methane is a valuable product and in many cases can be sold if it is captured.”
from pages 28 and 29
Shale revolutionized the oil and gas industry in America, taking us from needing to import most of our oil and gas, to being the largest producer in the world, being energy independent and revitalizing our economy – that is, up until the pandemic hit.
Here’s a bit of history on the Dakota Access Pipeline:
Dakota Access, a project of Energy Transfer Partners and other companies, would supplant 740 railcars of oil a day. In early 2016, the $3.8 billion pipeline was moving ahead, with almost every mile of the 1,172 miles completed. It had gone through its environmental reviews and had received the approval of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is required by law to sign off on parts of pipelines that cross or go below rivers and waterways. The company had also consulted with aobut fifty Indian tribes and made 140 revisions in the route as a result.
The last thing to be completed was a 1,320-foot segment–a quarter of a mile–that would be a hundred feet below the bed of the Missouri River. The Army Corps of Engineers gave the go-ahead in a 1,261-page report–almost one page for every foot of pipeline. But then the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, whose eighty-two hundred members live on a nearby reservation, objected, saying that it had not been consulted and that the pipeline, though buried deeply under the riverbed, would threaten their drinking water as well as violate both sacred tribal sites and the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. Energy Transfer replied that its efforts and those of the Army Corps of Engineers to consult had been spurned by the tribe and that the pipeline passed under private and federal lands, not tribal lands, and would be secured far beneath the riverbed. But then protestors on foot and horseback breached a barbed-wire fence into a construction area where six bulldozers were operating. Guards sought to push them back with pepper spray and a couple of guard dogs. An activist filmmaker was in position at the front line to record the event. The video went viral.
Eventually as many as ten thousand demonstrators, rallied by the environmental group Greenpeace, converged near the site, creating a media spectacle that went on for more than two hundred days. Among the protestors was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who would describe her experience as “transformational” and say that it had “galvanized” her.
…But the Obama administration, in its last months, stepped in to halrt constrution of the last 1,320 feet of the pipeline, overruling both the courts and the Army Corps of Engineers’ approval. A few months later, with the change in the White House, the Trump administration issued an executive order overturning the shutdown. Meanwhile, freezing weather and then the threat of melting snow and floods prompted the state to close down the protest camps. The last 1,320 feet of the 1,172 mile pipeline were completed….
By the end of May 2017, four months after the executive order giving the go-ahead, the first oil was flowing through the now-completed Dakota Access.
from pages 49-51
Regarding Russia:
…Yet Russia still has formidable accoutrements of power. It has scale. It has a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons and missiles and considerable cyber sills. It has the determination to project itself on the world stage. And it has natural resources–particularly vast amounts of oil and gas that underpin its place in the world.
Three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a new global competition between the United States and Russia has emerged–not the Cold War of history and nuclear doomsday, but still a cold war. It is playing out in regional conflicts, information warfare, cyberspace, energy, and overall relations. Since its interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, “Russia” has become a toxic subject and source of great rancor in Washington and domestic American politics.
Over his two decades as president, Vladimir Putin’s great international project has been to reassert Russia’s sway over the rest of the former Soviet Union, restore Russia as a great power globally, build new alliances, and push back against the United States. And whether Russia is partially responsible or not, Putin can point to outcomes that fit his objectives–NATO divided, the European Union in disarray, and America’s politics fragmented, nasty, and polarized.
from page 70
In the chapter, ‘Ukraine and New Sanctions,’ he gives details about Edward Snowden and his theft of National Security Agency files and their release to Russia.
He gives details on the friendship between Putin and Xi Jinping, China’s presidents:
The relationship between the Russian and Chinese presidents has taken on a very personal character. Xi was Putin’s guest at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June 2019. Putin apologized for keeping Xi up late, to what was 4 a.m. Chine time. “But,” he explained, “we talked about everything.” Xi added, “We never have enough time.” Two weeks later at a conference in Tajikistan, Putin surprised the Chinese leader with a present for his birthday–a large box of his favorite Russian ice cream. An appreciative Xi beamed that Putin was his “best friend.”
from page 124
Here’s more on Putin:
But there was still a burning question about Russia’s future. Who would succeed Putin when his presidential term ended in 2024? In the spring of 2020 the answer became clear. Putin would succeed Putin. A new constitutional revision would allow him to serve as president until 2036–more or less for life…
…But then the coronavirus began to spread to Russia…
from page 125
Talking about the rivalry between the USA and China:
China’s preponderance in Asia continues to increase. In early 2017, just days after becoming president, Donald Trump yanked the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would have encompassed twelve nations that border the Pacific–though specifically excluding China–in a new bloc representing 40 percent of world trade. It would have asserted U.S. commitment to Asia and given other Asian nations a counterforce to the powerful magnetic field of the Chinese economy. For those nations, it was as much political as economic. Trump’s action was seen in Asia as marking a retreat from the region–and an opportunity for China to fill the vacuum. Indeed, one Chinese called the U.S. withdrawal “a huge gift” to Beijing. No longer hampered by a counterweight, China proceeded with negotiations for its own trade agreements with Asian countries–excluding the United States.
from page 134
Regarding China and the South China Sea:
About half of the world’s oil tanker shipments pass through the South China Sea, not only to China, but also to Japan and South Korea. For Japan and South Korea, the possible risk of disruption would come from actions by China. For China, however, there is only one “certain power”–the United States, and, in particular, the U.S. Navy. Chinese strategists focus on a potential crisis scenario: Taiwan threatens independence, and China responds with force. The United States, in turn, responds by cutting the South China Sea oil line to China. What would happen next–escalation in unpredictable ways? Here, then, is part of Beijing’s strategic rationale for the 9-Dash Map and its assertion of sovereignty over those waters.
from page 157
He gives the history of container shipping – the idea came to a guy named Malcolm McLean, owner of a small trucking company:
The idea came to him when he had to wait in his truck while longshoremen “laboriously moved cargo one piece at a time.” As his frustration grew, he wondered, Why not just lift the whole truck body in one go and move it over longer distances by ship?
On April 26, 1956, cranes at the port of Newark, New Jersey, lifted up fifty-eight truck bodies, minus their wheels and cabins, and put them on a surplus World War II tanker bound for Texas…By the early 1960s, containers were becoming a real business, with McLean and his company in the lead…The world of longshoremen that had been depicted just a couple of years earlier in the 1954 film On the Waterfront was on its way out.
from page 162
In the chapter on China called “Belt and Road Building:”
…The Xinjiang region includes the Tarim Basin, which is one of China’s main domestic sources of oil and gas and where the Uighurs, a Muslim Turkic people, have traditionally been the dominant ethnic group, though with Kazakhs and other groups and now with many Han Chinese as well. In Xinjiang, the Han are now at least 40 percent of the population–up from 6 percent in 1949. Following a series of terrorist attacks that left scores dead, Beijing has clamped down with great severity. It has established large camps for Uighurs and other Muslims, holding perhaps as many as a million people. Chinese officials describe them as “education and training centers.” Critics describe them differently–as “mass incarceration” and indoctrination. These camps have become a focus of controversy and stimulated much international protest.
from page 180
This information from the same chapter:
Many countries want the investment and want to be sure that they are part of this new global economy, and they do not want to be left out of the China-driven “globalization 2.0.” At the same time, however, they want to ensure their own independence of action and will seek to balance the growing Chinese presence by engaging with Russia and the United States. The United States remains, after all, the most important economy in the world, and very important in terms of security.
And yet the United States is seen by many countries as stepping back, increasingly unpredictable and no longer reliable, which increases the allure of engagement with China. As one Chinese official observed, “The pullback of the United States is helping us.”
from page 188
In the chapter, “Wars in the Gulf,” in which he covers the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 and President Jimmy Carter’s response in January 1980:
The United States had taken on the direct security role–protecting the Gulf and the oil–that Britain had abandoned less than a decade earlier. For Moscow, the invasion would prove much more costly than the Kremlin could have imagined, for it would help set in motion the process that would lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It would also unleash a new jihad-ism, the impact of which would reverberate around the world and would reach to the very heart of the Arab world, throwing the region into crisis.
from page 211
Also in “Wars in the Gulf:”
One U.S. general was addressing six hundred senior Iraqi officers on what their roles would be in rebuilding the Iraqi military when word came that they all had just been dismissed. Even a plan to give officers $20 each to buy emergency supplies for their families was canceled. Altogether, more than 600,000 soldiers and other security officials were sent home devoid of compensation and pensions, no prospects, but only their guns and resentments and anger that would fuel resistance. Months later, a payment system for ex-soldiers was finally set up. “Demobilizing the Iraqi Army instead of depoliticizing it set the most capable group of men in the country on an adversarial course against us,” wrote Marine general and later U.S. defense secretary James Mattis. That decision to dissolve the army, a U.S. officer in Iraq was later to say, was the moment “that we snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and created an insurgency.”
from page 218
At the beginning of the chapter, “The Electric Charge:”
The lunch in a Los Angeles seafood restaurant in 2003 was not going well. Two engineers, J. B. Straubel and Harold Rosen, were pitching Elon Musk. An entrepreneur of iron-man determination, Musk was already known as one of the original members of the “PayPal Mafia,” who had launched the online payment system, and then as the founder of SpaceX, which was aiming to undercut the government’s cost for space transportation and pave the interplanetary path for travel to Mars. The engineers were pitching Musk on something that would operate at a lower altitude–an electric airplane.
“That’s not going to work,” interrupted Musk. “I have zero interest.”
An awkward silence ensued. They all went back to poking at their fish. Then Straubel thought, “Why not?” He might as well tell Musk about his obsession–the electric car.
from page 327
In the same chapter:
An electric car eliminates the need to go to the gas station, but it does require charging, and the second big obstacle is charging time and the availability of chargers. It still takes longer to charge a car, although using a super-fast charger–which is significantly more expensive–could bring down the time to around ten to fifteen minutes. The chargers will have to be much more widely available, numbering in the many millions. Someone will have to pay for them, and ultimately there will have to be a standardized business model. And something will have to be done for people who live in apartments and high-rises and park on the street.
from page 345
In the chapter, “Enter the Robot:”
In Iraq and Afghanistan, American soldiers riding in tanks and trucks were being maimed and killed by IEDs. In response, the Defense Department was determined to develop vehicles that would not need drivers–what would become known as autonomous vehicles.
from pages 347 and 348
From the same chapter:
…There was Sebastian Thrun before, and there was Sebastian Thrun after.” Among those unobtrusively watching the race was Larry Page, cofounder of Google. After the race, disguised with sunglasses and a hat, he approached Thrun. Page really wanted “to understand what’s going on,” Thrun later said. “Larry had been a believer in this technology for much longer than I even knew.” Indeed, Page had even toyed with doing a Ph.D. on autonomous vehicles.
Sometime later, Thrun received an email from Page, who said he was having problems with a robot that he had built to enable him to attend meetings at Google without being physically present. The robot wasn’t working. Thrun met up with him in a parking lot. Page opened up the trunk of his car and pulled out the robot for Thrun to examine. Thrun quickly pulled together a team, and the robot was fixed.
from page 350
From the same chapter:
The speed with which such information and updates can travel will depend on fast internet access and the availability of 5G wireless technology.
from page 354 talking about the computer technology necessary foo driverless cars
Some are already moving on to yet newer frontiers. Sebastian Thrun cofounded Udacity, an online tech education company, and then established a new company with Larry Page of Google–Kitty Hawk–that aims to introduce autonomous flying taxis. He is convinced that they will preempt autonomous ground taxi service.
from page 357
In the chapter, “Auto-Tech:”
“People are still physically going to need to move from Point A to Point B,” Mary Barra of GM said. “But they’re going to have multiple ways that they can do that.” Her ultimate goal, she said, is “a world with zero crashes, zero emissions, and zero congestion.”
from page 370
In the chapter, “Renewable Landscape:”
A great deal of effort is being poured into trying to develop utility-scale batteries, economically capable of storing large amounts of electricity that can be dispatched in an orderly way.
from page 402
From “The Changing Mix:”
But the plastic waste problem is largely not in the developed world. The United States generates less than 1 percent of the plastic waste in oceans. About 90 percent of river-sourced plastic pollution in the oceans comes from uncontrolled dumping into ten rivers in Asia and Africa, which, if properly managed, could dramatically reduce the wastage. Plastic bags and straws may be the most visible use of plastics, but they constitute less than 2 percent of plastics. Moreover, the coronavirus crisis did demonstrate a health advantage of plastic bags over reused cloth shopping bags.
from page 416
From the same chapter:
It is estimated that an onshore wind turbine requires fifteen hundred tons of iron, twenty-five hundred tons of concrete, and forty-five tons of plastic. About half a million pounds of raw materials have to be mined and processed to make a battery for an electric car.
from page 422
Excellent book. Everyone needs to know this stuff.