Posted on 05/31/2008 1:15:30 PM PDT by Donald Rumsfeld Fan
CARACAS, Venezuela: Venezuela's state petroleum company, PDVSA, increased petroleum imports by nearly 150 percent between the first quarter of 2007 and the same period this year, bank statistics show.
A report by the Venezuelan Central Bank this week demonstrated that petroleum imports reached US$1.5 billion (964 million) during the first quarter of 2008. The imports which include diesel oil, gasoline and chemical additives for gasoline products are the country's highest in more than a decade.
A spokesperson for PDVSA said the company had no immediate comment on the issue.
Economist Gustavo Garcia, a professor at a Caracas business school, said called the increase "one more factor that shows how production has fallen," forcing the company to purchase petroleum products outside of the country.
(Excerpt) Read more at iht.com ...
So, Hugo, how’s that nationalization thing going?
That is certainly true. But they have a more immediate problem. They can't get the crude out of the ground at a sufficient rate.
Their oil extraction rate has been declining and it's not related to lack of reserves. It's lack of functioning rigs, trained personnel and investment.
A classical socialist symptom.
I may be wrong but it seems Venezuela and other countries had a lot easier go of retrieving their oil when they dealt with American oil companies.
But hey Venezuela a socialist paradise doesn’t need all the extra revenues.
If anyone wants to know the best reason for vast spending on alternative energies, one need only look at the anti-American dictatorships that exist only because of the massive amount of cash generated by the world’s dependence on oil. Even if we increase our own production, there is just too much money in black gold, and too much of it is in areas culturally incompatible with democracy.
Yet Venezuela continues to export oil (due, as mentioned above, to its high refining needs.) Nonetheless, it reminds me some of the USSR’s exporting wheat even as millions of Russians were dying from famine.
Bingo...we have Hugo over a barrel so to speak. The majority of heavy crude refining capacity is done in the US. Even if Hugo wanted to cut us off, he would find no market for his oil. Right now Iran is experiecing exactly the same thing. They have declining production, a lot of what they produce is heavy crude, and demand for it as well as refining capacity is not there. Hugo is leitrally strangling his golden egg laying goose. Mexico is the same. Without foreign investment and expertise, their fields will dry up.
Ah, you just answered a question that I have been asking about Mexican crude. I hear that Mexico is swimming in oil. They have more of it than they can ship out and some US refineries that never took Mexican crude and starting to import it.
At the same time, aging fields and sluggish investments have caused exports to drop significantly in Mexico, Norway and, most recently, Russia. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries also cut production early last year and didn't move to boost supplies again until last fall.
But it still doesn't account for the local refinery taking shipments of Mexican crude and statements to the effect that Mexico had more crude than they could get rid of.
Venezuela increases petroleum imports despite vast deposits at home
This move will keep the oil price up and therefore hurt the US. Old Chavez is not as dumb as we try to depict him. He does understand the supply/demand game.
I read the headline and had the best laugh of the week, way to go, Sluggo. You’re doing a great job! /s
Importing petro product. Some refineries are offshore and do not belong to Venezuela. Been so since 1920.
El Hugo and Chavismo:
Nationalize private industry
Set price controls on goods
Confiscate private property
Install windfall profit taxes on the state run oil industry
Use all of the above to increase giveaways to the masses to protect popularity.
Result:
Oil production down 18% year over year, three years running as confiscatory policies cause maintenance of oil infrastructure to be neglected.
Inflation running at an annualized rate of 40%.
State run grocery store shelves bare, except for weevil infested beans, chicken necks and ten year old powdered milk as farmers smuggle their produce into Colombia to fetch market prices.
This is much what a future America could look like with an Obama Presidency and a 2/3 Democrat majority in Congress.
Just accessing one oil shale formation, the Green River oil shale formation in Utah, would bring on-line 800-1,200 billion barrels of oil, or more than enough oil to supply the U.S for more than 30 years without needing any oil imports! Although the initial cap-ex costs are high, it is far easier to extract oil from oil shale than from tar sands. And with the new in-situ technology, both CO2 and H2O can be captured and reused. Currently, the oil industry actually has to buy manufactured CO2 for use in enhanced oil recovery operations. So the CO2 would be another profit center from oil shale.
Unfortunately, although the technology is there to safely extract the oil, environmentalists, liberals, and democrats refuse to allow any drilling on known oil shale formations.
Venezuela has about 1/2 trillion barrels of heavy oil in the Orinoco Belt. But, since Hugo Chavez took over, their production has dropped from 3.5 million bpd to about 2.7 million bpd (see chart at link below). That represents a 23% reduction in oil production in 9 years. Incompetence is the order of the day in the Venezuelan national oil company (PDVSA).
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/Venezuela/Oil.html
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