Posted on 08/21/2026 7:42:01 PM PDT by Libloather
Venezuela's new petroleum minister sees her South American home not as a dilapidated former oil giant, but as an emerging energy economy ripe for U.S. and foreign investments in new oil and gas exploration, both onshore and offshore.
Paula Henao, who took over as the hydrocarbons minister in March after the forced U.S. removal of former leader Nicolás Maduro, told an overflowing Houston energy audience on Wednesday that Venezuela is much more than just its famed heavy-grade crude oil. There are more than 916 exploration opportunities awaiting foreign investment, she said, including natural gas and other untapped oil basins. She cited an estimated 192 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves, as well as the country's world-leading proven oil reserves of more than 300 billion barrels.
"It's an entire world waiting to be discovered, just waiting for us to reach these agreements so we can develop these new areas," Henao said in Spanish to the crowd at the posh Post Oak Hotel in Houston.
Henao and leaders of the Venezuelan state oil company, PDVSA, were in Houston this week for meetings and a showcase event in advance of a bigger Venezuela Energy Week in February in Caracas.
"Go to Venezuela to invest, go to Venezuela to develop businesses there," said PDVSA Vice President Jovanny Martinez, also speaking in Spanish. "We are at the right place at this historical moment. We have the energy that the world requires."
After decades of cycling between energy reform and renationalization, including the most recent 2007 appropriation of assets from ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and others, there's still a lot of hesitancy to invest in Venezuela as it again changes its hydrocarbon laws in the aftermath of Maduro's ouster. There's a recognition that this could be the last great chance for the Venezuelan energy sector to thrive.
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
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I’d drink a Billy Beer toast to you if I had one. Actually I wish I had a case of it in my closet. It wasn’t great beer but I imagine it’s worth something now. 🤔
I miss the 19 cents/gal gas price in 1961 in Iowa city.
My car Buick super with straight 8 cyl engine was a gas hog at 5 mpg in city but it rode smooth on highways with 18 mpg.
I would get 10+ gallons of gas once a month for $2.
There has been online chatter that the President wants serious consideration of Venezuela as a 51st state, due to all the oil beneath its surface. Not sure if that’s just a joke or not.
Instead of making Venezuela the 51st State, why not make it a US Territory much like Puerto Rico....
Interesting article there on the Argentinian oil sector, too.
“I’d drink a Billy Beer toast to you if I had one.”
Full cans are scarce and sell for $10-$13/can. Only a few full cans have come up for sale in the last year. Collectors pay around $5 for an empty can in good shape.
Billy Beer was the only bright spot of the Carter years and that ain’t saying much.
Making Venezuela a state won’t work but it would be great if it can go back to being a wealthy country like it used to be.
N.B. Venezuelan oil is “Heavy-Sour”, meaning that its spectrum of distillates has mostly molecules for things like tar and asphalt, and far fewer molecules for jet fuel, gasoline, home heating oil, etc. “Sour” means that it also has a lot of Sulfur. This means that it is much less valuable than “Light-Sweet” crude oil. Most of the world’s crude oil is H-S.
It is also much harder and more expensive to refine for the fractions of good molecules you can squeeze from it. The US has several refineries that specialize in H-S refining.
Ya got that right. 👌
There are a couple of refineries on the Gulf coast that can handle the sour crude from Venezuela.
(Don’t tell anyone, but I bought some stock in oil rig workover companies a while back.)
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