Oil by itself doesn’t guarantee wealth. It’s an extremely complex business, requiring a huge number of skilled people in the middle income ranges.
Exactly the kind of people that Hugo is pissing off the worst and who are fleeing the country in major numbers.
You can’t eat oil. A 30 day total boycott of Venezuelan crude by the US would unseat him.
They can’t ship it elsewhere. All the refineries are booked via long-term contracts.
you make good points.
He certainly has caused a massive brain drain at PDVSA and the country as a whole. One can only assume efficiency at pdvsa has plummeted in the last 5 years.
It is my understanding china is either building or discussing building refineries in china able to process venezuelan crude, but even if so it would be years before they come online I assume, so as you note he is very limited in who can actually process his not-so-fungible heavy sludge crude.
my short view is that venezuela is screwed, and this guy is going to send hundreds of millions to every other latin country to unseat traditional oligarchic governments (aka democracies). what a mess.
They can’t ship it elsewhere. All the refineries are booked via long-term contracts.”
One other point of consideration - The oil pumped out of Venezuela, is for all intents and purposes, sludge, and requires a particularly capability to refine it. That capability resides in the US. So, if we stop refining his oil, he’s really up the creek.
Hermano Hugo, Come Aciete y mierda.
So how would we get oil for those 30 days?