Local education on the peculiarities of the oil & gas industry are likely to come thick and fast even as Guyana proceeds to reap the anticipated rich returns from it world-class oil find. These days, neighbouring Venezuela, reportedly the country possessing the largest known oil reserves anywhere in the world, continues to find out that the complications associated with being an oil-rich country can have their own geo-political idiosyncrasies.
That much is reflected in the ongoing travails of its oil industry arising out of the determination of the Trump administration in Washington to pry President Nicholas Maduro from office. Over time, some mind-boggling developments have arisen from Washington’s attempts to bring Caracas’ state-run oil operations to a shuddering halt, arguably none more so than what we learnt recently, was the return to Venezuela of a consignment of cargo amounting to 950,000 barrels of crude oil originally bound for the USA but which had been halted on its journey on account of the US embargo. The consignment, reportedly valued at a whopping US$50 million had reportedly been ‘floating around’ at sea for an entire year!
The luckless tanker transporting the oil, the Gerd Knutsen, had reportedly been loaded back on January 2019 but had failed to arrive at its destination on the US Gulf Coast on account of the impasse between Washington and Caracas arising out of political events in Venezuela. The Gerd Knutsen reportedly set out on its journey to the US even before Washing-ton’s sanctions against Venezuela’s oil industry were running on ‘full throttle’.
The eventual return of the multi-million dollar oil consignment to Venezuela had been preceded by a legal battle between the Venezuelan state-owned oil company, PDVSA, and CITGO Petroleum Corpora-tion, the US-based company with interests in refining, transporting and marketing of oil as well as in the fuels, lubricants and petrochemicals industries.
It seems that notwithstanding a US court ruling, the Venezuelan authorities were able to have the stranded oil consignment returned to the country. A high-profile battle persists between Washington and Caracas as the US, in pursuit of its bid to remove President Maduro from office continues to take one measure after another to choke off his administration’s revenue stream from the country’s oil & gas industry. The Maduro administration, however, continues, up until now, to cut enough deals to keep the country’s oil sales going; its latest move being to surrender control of most of the country’s oil fields to foreign companies in order to keep what is, overwhelmingly, the country’s main source of revenue, alive.
Reports emanating from Caracas confirm that foreign companies are indeed taking over the day-to-day operations of Venezuelan oil fields. The US company, Chevron, remains the ‘last man standing’ in Venezuela among western oil companies and then, only because its stands to lose millions of dollars in valuable equipment if it pulls out.
