For full access, check to see if your firm has a license to The Deal Pipeline or login using your existing credentials. It became a bestseller, was translated into 14 languages and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1992. It tries to capture the whole energy field and how these pieces fit together to give the readers a picture of where we are in energy today. Whenever people say the end is in sight, technology comes along. If you draw a line from the Brazilian pre-salt to the Marcellus Shale to the oil sands of Canada, what they all have in common is the code is broken, that reserves that were uneconomic are now accessible. In terms of gas, what's happened with shale gas, it's still early days, when you have a resource of this magnitude entering the marketplace. Has it happened before, and are there any parallels we can draw from it. It's not a perfect analogy, but it was a potential massive resource that was now part of the competitive landscape. It was 20% in the 1980s, but plants run much more efficiently now. People were talking about a renaissance, but then we had Fukushima, and now it's a patchwork. Some [countries] will move more rapidly than we thought, and others will shut it down. It's a rethinking, but it reinforces the message that [Exelon Corp. There's been $120 billion invested in renewable generation, so it's already a big business. But when you measure it against the overall energy business, it's small. In the book there's a graphic of a wind turbine in the 1980s and today, and the one today is so much bigger. It will be part of the mix, but it has a long lead time to scale. Twenty years from now, oil will still be dominant, but we'll see some change after 2030. The scientists simply don't agree, so I wanted to address it in a different, more narrative way. I'm not a climate scientist, but it's clear that carbon is increasing in the atmosphere. If you say it's an energy resource, that strikes some people as funny. The incremental BTU energy that's saved is a hard subject to get your arms around. What strikes me is that there is becoming a global consensus about efficiency. China puts energy efficiency at the top of the list. You have all these information-gathering tools that you didn't have back then. Secondly, the way things are sold has become so much more globalized, and many of the major players are coming from the emerging markets. There's clearly been a globalization of economic clout around the world and the significance of China particularly, but also India, as players. The players are truly global, so you have on the one hand consolidation of the majors and disappearance of companies, but on the other hand you have the emergence of players that were never part of the game before. Do you think we'll still see a further consolidation of larger oil companies. I have no particular knowledge, and none seem evident. But the reason the supermajors have come into shale gas is that they need capital-hungry activity, and that becomes harder to find when you become bigger. Once we get out of this trough, supplying that energy and making sure it's there and not constrained is going to be a very big job. We have to be more efficient and find more sources of energy. The other is a question of security and the environment. Will that be because of restraints of physical resources, or because we're seeing less demand because of renewables and efficiency and we've reached a certain level of economic growth. The next three decades are going to be explosive, going from 1 billion to 2 billion cars on the road. How long did it take you to actually write "The Quest". I was covering a much wider landscape with this book. How did you find the time along with your consulting business and your mammoth energy conference every year. The way other people feel relaxed hitting golf balls, I find the process very enjoyable and trancelike. It's a challenge to get my arms around how to figure out the narrative, but while I do that, I love shaping it. Explore the real-time intelligence as researched and reported on by our team of financial journalists with a license to The Deal Pipeline. For other updates launch today's
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