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Windfall: How the New Energy Abundance Upends Global Politics and Strengthens America's Power
Windfall is the boldest profile of the world’s energy resources since Daniel Yergin’s The Quest , asserting that the new energy abundance—due to oil and gas resources once deemed too expensive—is transforming the geo-political order and is boosting American power.
“Riveting and comprehensive...a smart, deeply researched primer on the subject.” — The New York Times Book Review
As a new administration focuses on driving American energy production, O’Sullivan’s “refreshing and illuminating” ( Foreign Policy ) Windfall describes how new energy realities have profoundly affected the world of international relations and security. New technologies led to oversupplied oil markets and an emerging natural gas glut. This did more than drive down prices—it changed the structure of markets and altered the way many countries wield power and influence.
America’s new energy prowess has global implications. It transforms politics in Russia, Europe, China, and the Middle East. O’Sullivan considers the landscape, offering insights and presenting consequences for each region’s domestic stability as energy abundance upends traditional partnerships, creating opportunities for cooperation.
The advantages of this new abundance are greater than its downside for the it strengthens American hard and soft power. This is “a powerful argument for how America should capitalise on the ‘New Energy Abundance’” ( The Financial Times ) and an explanation of how new energy realities create a strategic environment to America’s advantage.
“Riveting and comprehensive...a smart, deeply researched primer on the subject.” — The New York Times Book Review
As a new administration focuses on driving American energy production, O’Sullivan’s “refreshing and illuminating” ( Foreign Policy ) Windfall describes how new energy realities have profoundly affected the world of international relations and security. New technologies led to oversupplied oil markets and an emerging natural gas glut. This did more than drive down prices—it changed the structure of markets and altered the way many countries wield power and influence.
America’s new energy prowess has global implications. It transforms politics in Russia, Europe, China, and the Middle East. O’Sullivan considers the landscape, offering insights and presenting consequences for each region’s domestic stability as energy abundance upends traditional partnerships, creating opportunities for cooperation.
The advantages of this new abundance are greater than its downside for the it strengthens American hard and soft power. This is “a powerful argument for how America should capitalise on the ‘New Energy Abundance’” ( The Financial Times ) and an explanation of how new energy realities create a strategic environment to America’s advantage.
497 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 12, 2017
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March 3, 2018
A few weeks ago, I watched a bad movie on Netflix—"The Cloverfield Effect." This near-future science fiction film (distantly related to the original "Cloverfield," an updated Godzilla-type movie) revolved around a disastrous attempt to generate unlimited energy in space, needed because the entire world was “two years from running out of all energy.” Yes, that’s really as stupid as it sounds. But Meghan O’Sullivan is here to tell us that just as stupid is the idea that we’re running out of fossil fuels, within any time frame that matters. And she is further here to tell us what that means, for our economy, our global position, and for the future stability of the world, both geopolitically and environmentally.
My major complaint about this book is that while the material is interesting, the writing is not. It is dry, dry, dry, Sahara Desert dry. And it’s repetitive—it was in high school that I stopped summarizing writings at the end of each section by simply reciting what I had written just before. Still, what’s contained here is informative, and in these days when stupidity like “fossil fuel divestment” is the level of most energy discussions, and the energy abundance we have obtained, to our great good fortune, is deliberately downplayed by politicians and the media, merely being informative is a big step forward.
The “new energy abundance” of the title, though, is not merely America’s energy abundance, but the world’s. Much focus is given to China, and other areas, from Russia to the Middle East, get ink as well. The central fact around which the book is written is the precipitous drop in crude oil and natural gas prices over the past decade—oil dropping from a high of almost $120 a barrel in 2008 to a low of $30 in 2016 (it is at about $65 today), and natural gas dropping by a factor of six. More to the point, these numbers don’t convey the atmosphere of 2008, which I remember well. The media was filled with anguished cries of “Peak Oil!” Government functionaries churned out document after document predicting imminent conflicts over mere access to oil, never mind its price. James Howard Kunstler wrote a whole book, World Made by Hand, about the nineteenth century feel our country was about to acquire as a result of running out of oil. But somewhere along the way, none of this happened.
However, contrary to what ignorant-but-optimistic people, and people deluded by their “green” ideology, think, none of this good fortune was because of renewable energy sources. As O’Sullivan tells us, in 2016 less than 3 percent of global energy was provided by (non-hydro) renewable sources, and that includes nuclear energy. Rather, what changed was the arrival of fracking and its cousins—new technologies that allowed the recovery of previously unrecoverable, or only recoverable uneconomically, oil and gas. “Tight oil,” “tight gas,” and “shale gas” are the biggest categories, though there are other ones. For practical purposes, or at least non-technical perception, they’re all “fracking,” which was developed by private entrepreneurs, though with extensive government support, both direct (tax breaks and so forth) and indirect (mapping and other scientific help). The end result is that the United States now produces more oil than ever before (the previous record was set in 1970) and huge volumes of cheap natural gas as well.
This new abundance also characterizes the rest of the world, or at least some of the rest of the world—that part blessed with the right geologic formations and receptive, competent governments and populations. Unfortunately for them, that’s very few countries—the latter, more than the former, is the problem, so fracking is not really a global phenomenon. Still, the Middle East has plenty of oil, as do many other countries, and fracking merely adds to that global market, which is extremely complex, as O’Sullivan goes over in detail. She explains how for decades the Saudis, in particular, have been able to manipulate oil prices, or at least prevent their rise, by maintaining (expensive) idle equipment and thereby being able to add quickly to the global supply at any time. Sometimes they do this when we ask them; sometimes for their own reasons, strategic or financial. Tied into this is the politics of OPEC and much else. O’Sullivan’s point is that fracking doesn’t mean oil is therefore always going to be magically cheap. Rather, it appears that fracking, since it relies on many small-scale installations, in practice will also allow quick reactions to price or demand changes. This will dampen price swings globally and, not coincidentally, benefit the United States financially and strategically (among other reasons making it less likely we’ll have to toady to the Saudis).
After covering all this in detail, O’Sullivan focuses on what this means for the United States. She notes that America is nearing true energy independence, both by itself and more generally as part of a loose North American cooperative. That cooperative is somewhat aspirational—O’Sullivan points out that Mexico has historically been incompetent, like so many countries that have oil, at properly husbanding its resources, and that Canada, thanks to Obama, is not very interested in placing more bets on unreliable and dishonest America, with Obama’s neo-colonialism having tried to deny to Canada the right to sell its oil for the benefit of Obama’s constituents, so Obama could virtue signal to his global friends. (Well, OK, O’Sullivan doesn’t put it exactly that way, but the conclusion is inescapable.). She then distinguishes energy independence, net out being greater than net in, from true autarchy. (One question that the author never addresses is where the equipment for fracking comes from—that is, could an enemy cut off our ability to frack?)
Given this objective windfall for America, O’Sullivan points to two benefits—that of hard power, and of soft power. As far as hard power, cheap energy is an enormous boost to America’s economy, with multiple effects, all of which she discusses competently. Not that hard power doesn’t have limits—O’Sullivan notes that both in Kuwait and Iraq, the United States, if it was fighting for oil, got nothing at all from the countries it liberated, except a big bill and lots of dead people. (Kuwait prohibits any foreign investment in its oil to this day—thanks a lot, Kuwait!) But our fist is stronger because we have cheap energy, and nobody would deny that.
As far as soft power, here O’Sullivan loses the plot a bit, apparently believing that soft power is doing what pleases George Soros and his buddies, and that because we have an “oil renaissance,” it will save the “liberal international order,” because people will think the United States is cool again. According to this, we suffered a massive blow to our soft power, for example, by failing to ratify the Kyoto Treaty. But Obama got it back by promising to cripple the US economy! In the real world, though, the U.S. may have had, in the past, some soft power when we were the global hegemon of a dynamic free world. In a West beset by demographic disaster where the chickens of decades of left-wing policies are coming home to roost, we don’t have any soft power at all. You know who does? China. We don’t, oil or not. We’re weenies, because everyone in the world laughs when we spend our days promoting transgenderism or some other stupid ideological cause of the day and abasing ourselves before Tuvalu for supposed environmental crimes (although, inconveniently, it was just revealed that Tuvalu is actually rising, not sinking beneath the seas). Weenies don’t have soft power. Meanwhile, China aggressively follows its One Belt, One Road, “going out” strategy, and buys friends. Now that’s soft power.
All this dubious analysis about our supposed soft power is tied back to fracking by the claim that without cheaper energy, Obama would have found it harder to try to give away the farm at the so-called Paris Accords in 2015 (which supposedly dramatically increased our soft power). Not that he did give away the farm—the President can’t, after all, bind the country to anything at all without any consent from the legislature, so the United States is no more bound by the Paris Accords than you are by the fact that your third cousin told his drug dealer you would pay for the crack he smoked. But all this inspired me to see what, exactly, was in the Paris Accords, where Obama’s worthless promises, according to O’Sullivan, meant that “India and Brazil, alongside China, [were] countries inspired by U.S. pledges to make more ambitious commitments of their own.”
Well, all signatories vaguely promised to reduce carbon emissions, without, of course, any legal requirement to do so. Specifics are fairly hard to find—the Wikipedia article on the Paris Accords offers no specifics on individual countries at all, nor any linked entries with specific data, and most news articles are extremely vague. This problem is exacerbated by there being no common metrics in the Accords (they were specifically rejected, for obvious reasons), so each country’s “submission” varies wildly in terminology, and therefore meaning. You can, if you dig, locate the text of the actual submissions, but they are mostly impenetrable bureaucrat-speak, and not comparable side-by-side. However, according to the Washington Post, “China, in its submission, said that, compared to 2005 levels, it would seek to cut its carbon emissions by 60 to 65 percent per unit of GDP by 2030. India said it would reduce its emissions per unit of economic output by 33 to 35 percent below 2005 by 2030.”
Let’s break that down. “Per unit of GDP” means that if those countries’ GDPs increase by 2030, as seems almost certain, by at least those percentages, absolute emissions will actually increase from those countries. On the other hand, the United States pledged to ignore its own GDP growth, and cut absolute emissions by 28 percent, not by 2030, but by 2025. Seeing the farcical nature of this, China also released an official statement that it would “make its best efforts to peak its emissions by 2030.” Wow. Bold. So, what Obama and his ilk wanted was for the United States to immediately cut its own throat, voluntarily implementing a James Howard Kunstler dystopian fantasy, so that we can find out in fifteen years that, in fact, other countries didn’t actually do anything. (And, in fact, according to a 2017 New York Times article, to nobody’s surprise, no other relevant country is even meeting their initial goals—except for us, due to the substitution of natural gas for coal, not because of any government action, but because fracking has made gas cheaper.) The propaganda nature of all this is shown by those little words, “per unit of GDP,” which appear almost nowhere in news reporting about the Paris Accords, thereby giving the false impression that both the United States and giant countries like China and India are agreeing to the same types of actions, which is the exact opposite of the truth.
Even more bizarrely, the other example of U.S. soft power O’Sullivan gives is that in 2009, before Obama visited China, Obama’s team “had a clever idea.” Their idea: offer for free to China “a resource assessment of China’s own shale deposits and a subsequent workshop to provide the Chinese with information about how to develop and manage whatever wealth was discovered.” Unsurprisingly, “the Chinese seized the offer.” What did the United States get? Hold on to your hats! We got “the opportunity for extensive conversations—the first of their kind—between U.S. officials and their Chinese counterparts about oil markets, the role of the market in procuring energy, pricing mechanisms for natural gas, and other matters.” Woo hoo! Those were probably the first of their kind because they were the kind of conversations that automatically happen if and when needed. But I’m sure the Chinese were shrieking with laughter behind closed doors, that we shoveled immensely valuable intellectual property to them in exchange for “extensive conversations”—that is, being allowed to yabber at them for a few hours. And, amazingly, “China, it turns out, was not the only country interested in benefiting from American shale gas expertise.” So we gave all our secrets to India, too. And we were able to “pave the way for conversations [more of those, yay!] about India’s heavy reliance on coal.” I bet the Indians and the Chinese got drunk together and laughed at the entire team of Obama yokels. This is not soft power, it is the behavior of the village idiot.
Anyway, next we get a predictable chapter on the environment, where O’Sullivan tries to wriggle out of the reality that more fossil fuels means more carbon in the air, and nothing is ever going to be done about it, not that she admits it. And the last third of the book is a series of chapters on different energy-producing regions, starting with Europe. This mostly revolves around the fraught relationship between Europe and its main energy supplier, Russia, and Europe’s response being to ban both fracking and nuclear power, because nothing demonstrates like that a real commitment to energy independence from Russia. (In passing, without meaning to, O’Sullivan demonstrates what real soft power is—“Even if the Soviets [and now the Russians] never actually terminated the flow of gas, their ability to do so would provide its own quiet form of influence.”) Next is China, where it quickly becomes evident that China will continue to use unbelievable amounts of coal for the foreseeable future, and is generally in an outstanding strategic position—not as energy independent as the United States, but going places a lot faster, and not going to stop using all the energy needed, from whatever sources, to do so. Finally, we get more detail on the Middle East, with an emphasis on the fact that we have a lot more interests there than energy, so even if we were energy autarkic, we’d still be heavily involved in the area. We also get much discussion of the various oil states’ plans to not become nomadic sand dwellers again when the oil runs out (which seems the most likely long-term result, given that apparently nobody at all actually works for a living in those states).
Intertwined with all this are reasonable recommendations about how the United States should act toward China, Russia, and the rest of the world as regards oil and gas trading, and should make strategic decisions relating to oil and gas production and consumption. O’Sullivan nods repeatedly to Graham Allison and discusses his interesting theory of the Thucydides Trap (she is a colleague of Allison’s, and thanks him first in her Acknowledgements). She ends the book with a repetitious summary of what she has said already, and does not fail to mention a few ways in which her analysis could be wrong (more demand for energy than expected, black swan events, technology not advancing as expected, etc.). At the end, the reader is certainly better informed about the world’s energy picture, and while the book isn’t perfect, it’s the only book I’m aware of (at least for a general readership) that covers this important topic in a relatively neutral fashion.
My major complaint about this book is that while the material is interesting, the writing is not. It is dry, dry, dry, Sahara Desert dry. And it’s repetitive—it was in high school that I stopped summarizing writings at the end of each section by simply reciting what I had written just before. Still, what’s contained here is informative, and in these days when stupidity like “fossil fuel divestment” is the level of most energy discussions, and the energy abundance we have obtained, to our great good fortune, is deliberately downplayed by politicians and the media, merely being informative is a big step forward.
The “new energy abundance” of the title, though, is not merely America’s energy abundance, but the world’s. Much focus is given to China, and other areas, from Russia to the Middle East, get ink as well. The central fact around which the book is written is the precipitous drop in crude oil and natural gas prices over the past decade—oil dropping from a high of almost $120 a barrel in 2008 to a low of $30 in 2016 (it is at about $65 today), and natural gas dropping by a factor of six. More to the point, these numbers don’t convey the atmosphere of 2008, which I remember well. The media was filled with anguished cries of “Peak Oil!” Government functionaries churned out document after document predicting imminent conflicts over mere access to oil, never mind its price. James Howard Kunstler wrote a whole book, World Made by Hand, about the nineteenth century feel our country was about to acquire as a result of running out of oil. But somewhere along the way, none of this happened.
However, contrary to what ignorant-but-optimistic people, and people deluded by their “green” ideology, think, none of this good fortune was because of renewable energy sources. As O’Sullivan tells us, in 2016 less than 3 percent of global energy was provided by (non-hydro) renewable sources, and that includes nuclear energy. Rather, what changed was the arrival of fracking and its cousins—new technologies that allowed the recovery of previously unrecoverable, or only recoverable uneconomically, oil and gas. “Tight oil,” “tight gas,” and “shale gas” are the biggest categories, though there are other ones. For practical purposes, or at least non-technical perception, they’re all “fracking,” which was developed by private entrepreneurs, though with extensive government support, both direct (tax breaks and so forth) and indirect (mapping and other scientific help). The end result is that the United States now produces more oil than ever before (the previous record was set in 1970) and huge volumes of cheap natural gas as well.
This new abundance also characterizes the rest of the world, or at least some of the rest of the world—that part blessed with the right geologic formations and receptive, competent governments and populations. Unfortunately for them, that’s very few countries—the latter, more than the former, is the problem, so fracking is not really a global phenomenon. Still, the Middle East has plenty of oil, as do many other countries, and fracking merely adds to that global market, which is extremely complex, as O’Sullivan goes over in detail. She explains how for decades the Saudis, in particular, have been able to manipulate oil prices, or at least prevent their rise, by maintaining (expensive) idle equipment and thereby being able to add quickly to the global supply at any time. Sometimes they do this when we ask them; sometimes for their own reasons, strategic or financial. Tied into this is the politics of OPEC and much else. O’Sullivan’s point is that fracking doesn’t mean oil is therefore always going to be magically cheap. Rather, it appears that fracking, since it relies on many small-scale installations, in practice will also allow quick reactions to price or demand changes. This will dampen price swings globally and, not coincidentally, benefit the United States financially and strategically (among other reasons making it less likely we’ll have to toady to the Saudis).
After covering all this in detail, O’Sullivan focuses on what this means for the United States. She notes that America is nearing true energy independence, both by itself and more generally as part of a loose North American cooperative. That cooperative is somewhat aspirational—O’Sullivan points out that Mexico has historically been incompetent, like so many countries that have oil, at properly husbanding its resources, and that Canada, thanks to Obama, is not very interested in placing more bets on unreliable and dishonest America, with Obama’s neo-colonialism having tried to deny to Canada the right to sell its oil for the benefit of Obama’s constituents, so Obama could virtue signal to his global friends. (Well, OK, O’Sullivan doesn’t put it exactly that way, but the conclusion is inescapable.). She then distinguishes energy independence, net out being greater than net in, from true autarchy. (One question that the author never addresses is where the equipment for fracking comes from—that is, could an enemy cut off our ability to frack?)
Given this objective windfall for America, O’Sullivan points to two benefits—that of hard power, and of soft power. As far as hard power, cheap energy is an enormous boost to America’s economy, with multiple effects, all of which she discusses competently. Not that hard power doesn’t have limits—O’Sullivan notes that both in Kuwait and Iraq, the United States, if it was fighting for oil, got nothing at all from the countries it liberated, except a big bill and lots of dead people. (Kuwait prohibits any foreign investment in its oil to this day—thanks a lot, Kuwait!) But our fist is stronger because we have cheap energy, and nobody would deny that.
As far as soft power, here O’Sullivan loses the plot a bit, apparently believing that soft power is doing what pleases George Soros and his buddies, and that because we have an “oil renaissance,” it will save the “liberal international order,” because people will think the United States is cool again. According to this, we suffered a massive blow to our soft power, for example, by failing to ratify the Kyoto Treaty. But Obama got it back by promising to cripple the US economy! In the real world, though, the U.S. may have had, in the past, some soft power when we were the global hegemon of a dynamic free world. In a West beset by demographic disaster where the chickens of decades of left-wing policies are coming home to roost, we don’t have any soft power at all. You know who does? China. We don’t, oil or not. We’re weenies, because everyone in the world laughs when we spend our days promoting transgenderism or some other stupid ideological cause of the day and abasing ourselves before Tuvalu for supposed environmental crimes (although, inconveniently, it was just revealed that Tuvalu is actually rising, not sinking beneath the seas). Weenies don’t have soft power. Meanwhile, China aggressively follows its One Belt, One Road, “going out” strategy, and buys friends. Now that’s soft power.
All this dubious analysis about our supposed soft power is tied back to fracking by the claim that without cheaper energy, Obama would have found it harder to try to give away the farm at the so-called Paris Accords in 2015 (which supposedly dramatically increased our soft power). Not that he did give away the farm—the President can’t, after all, bind the country to anything at all without any consent from the legislature, so the United States is no more bound by the Paris Accords than you are by the fact that your third cousin told his drug dealer you would pay for the crack he smoked. But all this inspired me to see what, exactly, was in the Paris Accords, where Obama’s worthless promises, according to O’Sullivan, meant that “India and Brazil, alongside China, [were] countries inspired by U.S. pledges to make more ambitious commitments of their own.”
Well, all signatories vaguely promised to reduce carbon emissions, without, of course, any legal requirement to do so. Specifics are fairly hard to find—the Wikipedia article on the Paris Accords offers no specifics on individual countries at all, nor any linked entries with specific data, and most news articles are extremely vague. This problem is exacerbated by there being no common metrics in the Accords (they were specifically rejected, for obvious reasons), so each country’s “submission” varies wildly in terminology, and therefore meaning. You can, if you dig, locate the text of the actual submissions, but they are mostly impenetrable bureaucrat-speak, and not comparable side-by-side. However, according to the Washington Post, “China, in its submission, said that, compared to 2005 levels, it would seek to cut its carbon emissions by 60 to 65 percent per unit of GDP by 2030. India said it would reduce its emissions per unit of economic output by 33 to 35 percent below 2005 by 2030.”
Let’s break that down. “Per unit of GDP” means that if those countries’ GDPs increase by 2030, as seems almost certain, by at least those percentages, absolute emissions will actually increase from those countries. On the other hand, the United States pledged to ignore its own GDP growth, and cut absolute emissions by 28 percent, not by 2030, but by 2025. Seeing the farcical nature of this, China also released an official statement that it would “make its best efforts to peak its emissions by 2030.” Wow. Bold. So, what Obama and his ilk wanted was for the United States to immediately cut its own throat, voluntarily implementing a James Howard Kunstler dystopian fantasy, so that we can find out in fifteen years that, in fact, other countries didn’t actually do anything. (And, in fact, according to a 2017 New York Times article, to nobody’s surprise, no other relevant country is even meeting their initial goals—except for us, due to the substitution of natural gas for coal, not because of any government action, but because fracking has made gas cheaper.) The propaganda nature of all this is shown by those little words, “per unit of GDP,” which appear almost nowhere in news reporting about the Paris Accords, thereby giving the false impression that both the United States and giant countries like China and India are agreeing to the same types of actions, which is the exact opposite of the truth.
Even more bizarrely, the other example of U.S. soft power O’Sullivan gives is that in 2009, before Obama visited China, Obama’s team “had a clever idea.” Their idea: offer for free to China “a resource assessment of China’s own shale deposits and a subsequent workshop to provide the Chinese with information about how to develop and manage whatever wealth was discovered.” Unsurprisingly, “the Chinese seized the offer.” What did the United States get? Hold on to your hats! We got “the opportunity for extensive conversations—the first of their kind—between U.S. officials and their Chinese counterparts about oil markets, the role of the market in procuring energy, pricing mechanisms for natural gas, and other matters.” Woo hoo! Those were probably the first of their kind because they were the kind of conversations that automatically happen if and when needed. But I’m sure the Chinese were shrieking with laughter behind closed doors, that we shoveled immensely valuable intellectual property to them in exchange for “extensive conversations”—that is, being allowed to yabber at them for a few hours. And, amazingly, “China, it turns out, was not the only country interested in benefiting from American shale gas expertise.” So we gave all our secrets to India, too. And we were able to “pave the way for conversations [more of those, yay!] about India’s heavy reliance on coal.” I bet the Indians and the Chinese got drunk together and laughed at the entire team of Obama yokels. This is not soft power, it is the behavior of the village idiot.
Anyway, next we get a predictable chapter on the environment, where O’Sullivan tries to wriggle out of the reality that more fossil fuels means more carbon in the air, and nothing is ever going to be done about it, not that she admits it. And the last third of the book is a series of chapters on different energy-producing regions, starting with Europe. This mostly revolves around the fraught relationship between Europe and its main energy supplier, Russia, and Europe’s response being to ban both fracking and nuclear power, because nothing demonstrates like that a real commitment to energy independence from Russia. (In passing, without meaning to, O’Sullivan demonstrates what real soft power is—“Even if the Soviets [and now the Russians] never actually terminated the flow of gas, their ability to do so would provide its own quiet form of influence.”) Next is China, where it quickly becomes evident that China will continue to use unbelievable amounts of coal for the foreseeable future, and is generally in an outstanding strategic position—not as energy independent as the United States, but going places a lot faster, and not going to stop using all the energy needed, from whatever sources, to do so. Finally, we get more detail on the Middle East, with an emphasis on the fact that we have a lot more interests there than energy, so even if we were energy autarkic, we’d still be heavily involved in the area. We also get much discussion of the various oil states’ plans to not become nomadic sand dwellers again when the oil runs out (which seems the most likely long-term result, given that apparently nobody at all actually works for a living in those states).
Intertwined with all this are reasonable recommendations about how the United States should act toward China, Russia, and the rest of the world as regards oil and gas trading, and should make strategic decisions relating to oil and gas production and consumption. O’Sullivan nods repeatedly to Graham Allison and discusses his interesting theory of the Thucydides Trap (she is a colleague of Allison’s, and thanks him first in her Acknowledgements). She ends the book with a repetitious summary of what she has said already, and does not fail to mention a few ways in which her analysis could be wrong (more demand for energy than expected, black swan events, technology not advancing as expected, etc.). At the end, the reader is certainly better informed about the world’s energy picture, and while the book isn’t perfect, it’s the only book I’m aware of (at least for a general readership) that covers this important topic in a relatively neutral fashion.
January 11, 2020
This is well-written and heavily footnoted and is probably great for someone into the cynical realpolitik of the energy business. I found it a bit of a slog though because it seemed to have way more detail than was necessary for making its main and fairly simple point. I was also disappointed because the cover illustration suggests the book covers renewable energies like solar and wind, but in reality it is overwhelmingly focused on fossil fuels--as if climate change were not a problem with policy implications for America and the world.
January 23, 2019
Useful for understanding the nature of the supposed energy abundance, and giving a quick survey of how it might affect the big players. She clearly lives the subject, but at the same time it was hard to understand whether any of her analysis was going deeper than the most basic examination of what happens when different people get more resources. On the writing, it felt like word-stuffing, like if you are trying to stretch a paper for a bunch of extra pages to meet a teacher-imposed minimum.
June 2, 2018
International relations apparently are (or should be) all about buying & selling energy and the economics thereof. The author's data and analysis are compelling, but a bit dry & repetitive.
March 30, 2021
One of my former Harvard professors knocks it out of the park with this thought-provoking and insightful work on how America’s energy abundance is changing and will continue to change the geopolitical landscape. From an excess of supply resulting from new technologies, oil prices have been driven down and traditional oil heavies have lost their decided leverage with the worldwide market. O’Sullivan skillfully argues that relationships with China, Russia, Europe and the Middle East have all served to strengthen—not weaken—America’s strategic advantage and how the impact of these relationships will continue to shape the global order in favor of the US for years to come. Published almost 4 years ago, this New York Times Bestseller ranks up there with the likes of Daniel Yergin and others who are expert on this topic.
February 2, 2018
Essential Read for anybody interested in energy or international politics
Outstanding insight on past, current, and future trends. While not an academic book, she takes an academic approach in outlining assumptions and where her assumptions break down. This is an essential read if you work or are interested in energy or international politics.
Outstanding insight on past, current, and future trends. While not an academic book, she takes an academic approach in outlining assumptions and where her assumptions break down. This is an essential read if you work or are interested in energy or international politics.
October 26, 2017
The book covers three main topics: the phenomenon of energy abundance, it's effect on America's place in the world, and finally, a series of chapters the repercussions for various countries and regions. Much of our relative energy abundance of today is from the US (and there are reasons for that), and most of that through the development of unconventional techniques such as fracking.
If one is looking for simple "A begets B" causation, this isn't your book; the intertwining worlds of geopolitics and energy are complicated. In fact, what struck me most about the geopolitical effects of energy abundance were the non-intuitive and indirect effects the boom has had, often several levels removed from the cheap oil and gas itself. For example, the book explores why cheap natural gas allowed Obama to push for the Paris Climate Accord, has weakened natural gas supply as a Russian tool of political pressure, and has allowed China to start to move away from dependencies by bad-actor petro-states...and none of these circumstances involved direct supply of natural gas by the US.
The focus here is on fossil fuels, although early in the book the author does place them in the context of an overall energy outlook with renewables, nuclear, etc. Despite the rapid progress being made in the alternative energy source industry, the large bulk of the world's energy will need to come from fossil fuels for a while to come, if only as a transition to a greener future.
"Windfall" is to 21st century energy what Daniel Yergin's "The Prize" was to the 20th; a tour through how oil and gas shape the energy and the geopolitical world of the our day. The book is well-researched, current, and quite readable. O'Sullivan combines scholarship with stints in places like Iraq to bring expertise to the topic. Highly recommended for anyone wanting to understand a major driver of world events and international relationships.
If one is looking for simple "A begets B" causation, this isn't your book; the intertwining worlds of geopolitics and energy are complicated. In fact, what struck me most about the geopolitical effects of energy abundance were the non-intuitive and indirect effects the boom has had, often several levels removed from the cheap oil and gas itself. For example, the book explores why cheap natural gas allowed Obama to push for the Paris Climate Accord, has weakened natural gas supply as a Russian tool of political pressure, and has allowed China to start to move away from dependencies by bad-actor petro-states...and none of these circumstances involved direct supply of natural gas by the US.
The focus here is on fossil fuels, although early in the book the author does place them in the context of an overall energy outlook with renewables, nuclear, etc. Despite the rapid progress being made in the alternative energy source industry, the large bulk of the world's energy will need to come from fossil fuels for a while to come, if only as a transition to a greener future.
"Windfall" is to 21st century energy what Daniel Yergin's "The Prize" was to the 20th; a tour through how oil and gas shape the energy and the geopolitical world of the our day. The book is well-researched, current, and quite readable. O'Sullivan combines scholarship with stints in places like Iraq to bring expertise to the topic. Highly recommended for anyone wanting to understand a major driver of world events and international relationships.
November 19, 2019
Designed for a general audience, O'Sullivan does a good job of explaining complex issues for non-experts. Sometimes that means somewhat simplistic explanations but that is likely a necessary trade-off for this style of book. It looks at the interplay of energy with geopolitics, specifically arguing that the shift from energy scarcity to energy abundance will have lasting, positive impacts on geopolitics and the US's role. Current events may derail the prognostications but the explanations of how energy has impacted geopolitical relationships in the past will no doubt remain useful.
November 14, 2017
Solid view of the impact of fracking and the major increase in natural gas in the US and its impact on the US and the international community.
February 19, 2018
"Windfall" is a pretty strong analysis of how the new changing energy landscape is altering some the dynamics that only a decade or so analysts thought would drive the energy flows of the world. She takes a global survey of the energy dynamics that the US, Chinese, Russians among others will face in what appears to be a relatively abundant global energy outlook.
O'Sullivan tries to squelch some of the more optimistic predictions that US energy independence will allow the US to withdraw from the MidEast and be insulated from energy shocks. Her argument that in a global energy market the US will still be vulnerable to exogenous energy shocks. This argument is convincing if one is trying to counter those arguing for total energy autarky, but get stretched a bit one considers (1) a great power/global military conflict would end that global energy market such as it is (2) even in its current form the idea of global energy prices moving in tandem without friction or notable regional price differentials is not borne out by facts.
She also makes the contrarian case that oil prices hold in their recent range (deemed historicall on the low side) will make the world MORE dependent on Mid Eas oil, not LESS. This only works if you except her numbers on what price level in oil US shale type producers can drill at a profit. Only problem her stats for those price levels are about 5-6 years out of date. Its not $60 a barrel its getting on average into the 40s and lower for some fields and producers.
O'Sullivan tries to squelch some of the more optimistic predictions that US energy independence will allow the US to withdraw from the MidEast and be insulated from energy shocks. Her argument that in a global energy market the US will still be vulnerable to exogenous energy shocks. This argument is convincing if one is trying to counter those arguing for total energy autarky, but get stretched a bit one considers (1) a great power/global military conflict would end that global energy market such as it is (2) even in its current form the idea of global energy prices moving in tandem without friction or notable regional price differentials is not borne out by facts.
She also makes the contrarian case that oil prices hold in their recent range (deemed historicall on the low side) will make the world MORE dependent on Mid Eas oil, not LESS. This only works if you except her numbers on what price level in oil US shale type producers can drill at a profit. Only problem her stats for those price levels are about 5-6 years out of date. Its not $60 a barrel its getting on average into the 40s and lower for some fields and producers.
September 22, 2021
Windfall: How the New Energy Abundance Upends Global politics and Strengthens America's Power by Meghan O'Sullivan is a rather interesting book. By far the most valuable part is comprised of the first few chapters, which discusses the arrival of the New Energy Abundance that the book is principally concerned with. The rest of the book is a bit more uneven. It is clear that O'Sullivan knows her stuff, but too much of her analysis of geopolitics is built through the lens of energy. While an important component of geopolitics, I feel a little uneasy about some of her conclusions. Sure, they make sense if you view the world principally through energy security and markets, but they seem a little more questionable when one takes a more expansive view of geopolitics. Her judgment seems a bit too optimistic for my taste.
Still, this book is accessible and is a substantive contribution to the popular literature of energy security. It was close to 5 stars, but honestly too much has changed since this was published just four years ago. I liked the idea of taking seriously how this book could be wrong at the tail end of the book, but now I'm more interested in seeing if there can be a follow up chapter or two about the effects of the pandemic.
88/100
Still, this book is accessible and is a substantive contribution to the popular literature of energy security. It was close to 5 stars, but honestly too much has changed since this was published just four years ago. I liked the idea of taking seriously how this book could be wrong at the tail end of the book, but now I'm more interested in seeing if there can be a follow up chapter or two about the effects of the pandemic.
88/100
May 23, 2018
We all know fracking and liquefied natural gas have turned the U.S. from an importer to an exporter of oil while crushing the cost of filling our gas tanks. In most of my own 46 year existence people would have claimed one to be insane for suggesting such a thing is possible. Somehow Sullivan makes such things seem almost dull. In truth we are living in a world of increasing abundance in everything and cheaper energy is just one manifestation of this fact. This book focuses purely on LNG and its implications. Which is fine in itself but the implications of abundance is so much more than American power. Sullivan quoted Thomas Friedman a lot in this book. There is a reason for this. Friedman has long been a global capitalist who has written about the benefits of globalization and markets. Before reading this book I would recommend anything by Friedman, Pinker, Diamantis, among others.
January 26, 2020
Very current, insightful, informed analysis of the current energy situation in the US and the world. It is unfortunate that those outside the oil&gas industry are unaware of the huge economic benefit that tight oil and gas it is providing to everyone in terms of jobs, GDP and low prices. Our price at the pump and heating bills have gone down and leveled off for years and people take that for granted. Shut off fracking and we are all going to pay a huge price in lost jobs, lost global strength, and energy costs that hit those least able to afford it. Who wants to return to being held hostage by the middle east like we were since WWII to just a few years ago? And it lowered our carbon by rapidly wiping out coal to boot. This book explains it in great detail, plus analysis of the geopolitical implications.
February 19, 2018
Well written and deeply-researched book on the overall Geo-political implications of the US Gas and Oil fracking windfall. A huge number of references in the back of the book to back up her research.
On the whole, the author tries to be fair and objective on the various geopolitical possibilities and implications and does a good job there. The only point that I thought her own ideology perhaps came through (on a few small occasions) was that of the implications on and interactions with the politics of climate change. But, it was minor.
Overall an excellent and interesting read despite its somewhat technical nature - which is what the author intended.
On the whole, the author tries to be fair and objective on the various geopolitical possibilities and implications and does a good job there. The only point that I thought her own ideology perhaps came through (on a few small occasions) was that of the implications on and interactions with the politics of climate change. But, it was minor.
Overall an excellent and interesting read despite its somewhat technical nature - which is what the author intended.
May 18, 2018
Smart, brainy and well-researched book, which looks at geopolitics and the impact of the shale boom on oil/natural has on the policies and politics of major suppliers and consumers. Some insights about conventional wisdom, which show such :wisdom" may well be wrong, and how the shale boom may be tipping the scales toward less carbon-intensive consumption were fascinating. Indeed, reading the book was timely because one of the author's theses about the ability of the US shale producers to respond to a supply disruption is playing out right now.
Fascinating and brilliantly done.
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August 18, 2018This is a very good and throughly researched book! Although I do not share Mrs. O´Sullivan´s views concerning the future role of fossil fuels in the world energy´s mix - as well as some of her political views - I have to acknowledge that she has presented a convincing and original argument.
September 8, 2019
The Goodreads description of Windfall is on point. I encourage anyone with an interest in geopolitics and/or energy to pick this book up to understand the potential for the USA’s newfound energy abundance on geopolitics and bilateral relationships across the globe.
April 12, 2020
O’Sullivan gives a thoughtful and accessible survey of the implications the current energy market has for geo-politics. It’s thought provoking and challenges some of the commonly used rhetoric from headlines and political debates.
February 20, 2018
Excellent overview of the energy production state-of-play and the geopolitical implications.
May 10, 2018
Very good discussion of today's energy market and it's current and potential impacts on international relations.
November 7, 2018
Exhaustive, compelling look at the current state of oil in the global economy, given the rise of shale-production in North America.
August 1, 2022
A lot of information here about the relationship between energy security and geopolitics. Chapters on Russia and China are very informative. Recommended for my strategist friends.
April 5, 2024
To get a big picture view of why the energy landscape is the way it is today (2020s) then take the time to read through this book.
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