Few sectors are as strategic and have undergone as many changes in recent years as energy. In the late 1990s, the United States was a net importer of oil and gas, an element that added pressure to the balance of payments and became a historic headache, geopolitically speaking. No one could have anticipated that two decades later, the world’s leading power would become one of the three largest hydrocarbon exporting economies thanks to the shale revolution. This is one of the major economic and geopolitical changes that Daniel Yergin masterfully explores in The New Map, a comprehensive guide to the current energy landscape.
With acute expository skill, Yergin describes the other major shifts that have affected the industry, such as the rise of China and its enormous appetite for energy (replacing the US as the top importer), the changes brought about by the energy transition and the Paris Accord, the political rearmament of Putin’s Russia, upon which Europe has grown increasingly dependent, and the latest entanglements in the powder keg that is the Middle East after the highly interventionist presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. These and other issues, such as the incipient electric car industry, new infrastructures for liquefied gas and gas pipelines, and the advent of renewable energies, are helping to shape the scenario as it plays out on four main stages: the United States, China, Russia, and the Middle East.
It is a highly comprehensive book that relies heavily on data, avoids making value judgements, and addresses the subject in a complete and panoramic way. It not only sheds light on the changes underway in a fundamental sector, but clarifies the dynamics of an increasingly fragmented and complex world order.
