Obama Administration Adding Oil (and Caspian) Balance to Energy Team

One persistent knock against the Obama administration's energy team is that it is one-dimensional -- everyone has a clean-tech background, the mirror image of the oil industry bent of the Bush White House. At the top, climate and energy czar Carol Browner is a former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and Energy Secretary Steven Chu ran, among other things, an alternative energy development program while director at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. The criticism has been that, even if you want to accelerate non-fossil fuel research and controls on greenhouse gases, you still need a balance in terms of expertise since, according to most forecasts, it's going to be a long time before oil and natural gas vanish from our fuel mix. No policy can be serious unless it takes shrewd account of everything.

All the while, however, word was that the administration intended, but simply hadn't gotten around yet, to name senior global energy officials both in the National Security Council (the president's foreign policy think tank) and the State Department. Now, it looks like Frank Verrastro, one of the Caspian era's steadiest hands, will be taking the NSC job. David Goldwyn, who doesn't have the same oil industry experience but does possess a long biography in senior government energy jobs, will take the State Department position.

Verrastro, currently director of energy and national security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, seems likely to be named senior NSC director for energy and the environment.

I first met Verrastro a decade ago when he was Pennzoil's Washington representative and a key player in the negotiation of the pivotal offshore Baku contract between the world's largest oil companies and Azerbaijan President Heydar Aliyev. He was also in the center of the mix on making the Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline happen.

One main truth I found while researching The Oil and the Glory was that at most a handful of the players -- diplomats, oilmen, local officials, and so on -- truly understood the complex events taking place on the Caspian. Meaning not just being able to recite events, but instinctively grasping them so as to accurately and trenchantly forecast what came next.

Verrastro gets the global oil and natural gas game, and at the same time is conversant on clean energy. I'd say he'll be an effective player.

I don't know Goldwyn at all. He was an assistant secretary for energy during the Clinton administration, and is said to be a former protege of New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson. Since Dick Morningstar, Eurasian energy czar under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, already has the former Soviet Union, Turkey and parts of Europe, it looks like Goldwyn will handle the rest of the world. Morningstar is another former Caspian hand from the 1990s.

While we are on the subject of names, Jon Elkind, a former NSC director for Central Asia whom I first met on a plane in Turkmenistan back in 1995, is the new principal deputy assistant secretary of energy for policy and international affairs. Elkind is a no-nonsense kind of guy. The Caspian will be getting smart attention all around.