Over the holiday weekend, we ran my three-part series on President Trump’s de facto seizure from Venezuela of oil reserves that, putatively, would well more than double American reserves. Here are the links to parts one, two, and three. I say “putatively” because, although the 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan reserves in question (compared to America’s 46 billion) are said to be proven, it is a long shot that the United States will actually get the oil.
At around 304 billion barrels, Venezuela has the world’s largest store of proven reserves, but it now contributes only a million barrels per day — just 1 percent of global supply. That’s down significantly from the nearly 3.5 million bpd production level the country reached prior to Hugo Chávez’s Bolivar revolution; it is a significant rebound, however, from the nadir of 392,000 bpd in 2020 to which production plummeted under Chávez’s protégé, Nicolás Maduro. Obviously, the production infrastructure became dilapidated (parts of it became outright useless) under the corrupt Marxist regime after Chávez’s 2007 expropriation of the assets of U.S. oil companies, valued at over $20 billion.
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