Daniel Yergin shared his thoughts with CNBC on some of the hot topics in the energy world. Yergin is the author of the new best-seller "The Quest: Energy Security and the Remaking of the Modern World," the successor to his Pulitzer Prize winning book, "The Prize."

Photo: Bloomberg | Getty Images Daniel Yergin

Yergin, CNBC's global energy expert, is chairman of IHS CERA.

1. In The Quest, you trace the historic conflicts in Iran’s relations with the West, and in particular, the United States. What today are the risks to the oil market from Iran?

There hasn’t been much geopolitics in the oil price in recent times, but that appears to be changing. Tension over Iran has been ratcheted up by the most recent United Nations report on Iran’s nuclear program.

The report was very explicit about the route to a weapon and suggested that the clock is really ticking. French President Sarkozy has called for a ban on Iranian oil. But the most likely response at this point is a new round of sanctions that would be more directly aimed at Iranian oil exports, such as prohibiting transactions with Iran’s central bank. In The Quest Iran is ranked at the top of the risks for the Gulf region, and these latest developments only reinforce it. As always, on sanctions, the question of what Russia and China do will be critical.

2. What about alternative oil supplies?

In terms of world oil, what is particularly striking is the rebalancing of Western Hemisphere oil supplies. We’re likely to see a much more north-south axis in hemispheric oil trade, and declining imports from the Eastern Hemisphere.

Three big things are happening. Two of them were hardly even on the horizon a decade ago. “Tight oil”—which uses the same technology as shale gas—is leading to an unexpected rebound in U.S. oil production. The tight oil, extracted from shale and other very dense rocks, was just 200,000 barrels per day in 2000. It could be as much as three million in a decade.

The second is the ability to produce the “presalt” oil in deep waters offshore of Brazil. If development proceeds more or less on plan, the “presalt”—combined with existing resources— could have Brazil producing twice as much as Venezuela by the beginning of the next decade.

The third are the advances in producing oil sands in Canada. The oil sands output is now about equivalent to Libya’s before its civil war, and this is a big reason that Canada is now our largest source of oil imports, by far.

3. But what about the Keystone XL pipeline and its postponement by the State Department?

Logistics—that is, our pipeline systems—need to catch up with the growth of supply from Canada and North Dakota, which is the pioneer state for tight oil. That’s what the new Keystone XL pipeline is all about. It’s striking that the postponement was announced the same week as the UN report on Iran’s nuclear program. Here is a pipeline that will, initially, move 700,000 additional barrels down to the United States, equivalent to about a third of Iran’s total exports. It would be about 1700 miles long, and we already have 168,000 miles of oil pipelines in the country.

4. What happens if it does not get a go-ahead after the Presidential election?

Other systems will be used to move some of the oil sands into the United States, including rail cars and the expansion of existing pipeline systems, which do not need new State Department approval.