But Daniel Yergin, the energy expert and author of "The Quest, " sees things differently.

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Daniel Yergin of Cambridge Energy Research Associates says that affects a big chunk of the nation's energy supply.

NPR: Oil Prices Likely to Stay High Next Year

Daniel Yergin is chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, an IHS company.

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Senior Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer Heather Matzke-Hamlin and Vice Chairman Daniel Yergin sold shares in August.

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Daniel Yergin received the Pulitzer Prize for The Prize: the Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, published in an updated edition in 2009.

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Daniel Yergin, in his latest and arguably most promethean work, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World, infuses a rich ingathering of information and analysis with the narrative power of a McMurtry, the human interest of an O.

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Wrong numbers, says Daniel Yergin.

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Mr. DANIEL YERGIN (Cambridge Energy Research Associates): When people build offshore platforms, they build them for a hundred-year storm. 2005 was a year that you had not one but two hundred-year storms within a matter of weeks of each other, and the result was one of the biggest energy shocks since the 1970s.

NPR: Oil Prices Likely to Stay High Next Year

Mattei shook up the business by offering oil-exporting nations a bigger share of production. (He also reportedly tried to win a sweet deal by enticing the Shah of Iran with an Italian princess.) At one point British diplomats fretted that Mattei's dealmaking could "seriously prejudice the stability of the Middle East, " according to The Prize, Daniel Yergin's 1991 history of the oil business.

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