Friendly overtures to Venezuela
President Joe Biden (D) is reportedly preparing to ease sanctions on socialist Venezuela to allow a U.S. oil company to resume production there, which comes as OPEC announced early Wednesday that it would be significantly cutting oil production.
The New York Times reported that Russia and Saudi Arabia, acting as the leaders of the 23-member nation OPEC energy cartel, announced a massive reduction in oil production of two million barrels per day, a move that will likely send gas prices skyrocketing and cause political problems for the Biden administration.
The Biden administration is now “preparing” to lift sanctions on Venezuela to allow Chevron to pump oil again from the leftist authoritarian regime in an attempt to stave off political disaster for the administration caused by rising fuel prices.
The administration would give “significant sanctions relief” if Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s regime held talks with the country’s political opposition and held free and fair elections in 2024. The administration has also worked out a deal freeing up hundreds of millions of dollars in Venezuelan funds that are frozen in U.S. banking institutions.
The Biden administration also released convicted narco traffickers related to Maduro in exchange for hostages taken by the regime, a move that could incentivize other hostile foreign powers to detain American citizens so they can use that as leverage over the Biden administration.
And all of this is because the administration clamped down on domestic oil production and refuses to change that policy (more here).
Or perhaps it has long wanted to be friendlier towards leftist Venezuela.
Sometimes the answer is “all of the above.”
Wait a tick. Weren’t those sanctions put in place due to the results of a presidential election that the US thought was rigged? There’s a ton of irony that Joe is the one removing them if that’s the case. (Or maybe there’s another term for this.)
Yes, all of the above is correct.
Today’s despotic Marxist left is brothers in arms with the despotic Marxist regimes of the world.
They also despise the US and its citizens.
Not a good combination for a sane world.
So, North American oil is bad, but oil from despotic regimes elsewhere, probably produced with fewer pollution controls, is good.
All of the above + the midterms
“The New York Times reported that Russia and Saudi Arabia, acting as the leaders of the 23-member nation OPEC energy cartel, announced a massive reduction in oil production of two million barrels per day, a move that will likely send gas prices skyrocketing…”
I don’t doubt that gas prices at the pump will skyrocket.
Reportedly, the world consumes a bit over 88 million barrels of oil a day. A reduction of 2 million barrels a day is a reduction of .0227%… Might someone be so kind as to explain how that minuscule a reduction can legitimately result in sending “gas prices skyrocketing”?
Yes I know, our leadership, both governmental and corporate lie about practically everything… which raises the question, might there be some validity to Putin’s accusation that America has become an “Empire of Lies”?
its also harder to refine than saudi crude, the indicted figures, were a small part of the sun cartel, that comprise the top staff of the venezuelan military, including diosdado cabello, who really runs the country,
there were also about 150 dead student protesters in 2017-2018, fwiw,
Glenn Reynolds weighs in on this:
https://nypost.com/2022/10/06/biden-hates-republicans-so-much-he-would-rather-give-oil-money-to-venezuela-and-saudi-arabia-than-texas/
@Geoffrey Britain
Your math is wrong. And you should’ve known it when you realized that 2 is 2% of 100, and by logic should be (and is) a much larger percentage of 88.
You forgot the answer you got is where “1.0” = 100 and the numbers to the right of the dot are the percentage. So you need to multiply by 100 after you get the first answer.
Which gives you a decline of a bit over 2.27%. That’s big. Not crippling but big and painful. Perhaps not enough to make the jump we see or to rationally explain it, but that’s still chopping off a lot.
They lie about plenty, but analyzing that isn’t helped if you can’t assess their claims accurately.
And sure, the US has become an empire of lies if it ever wasn’t one. But some certainly never stopped. I still remember them fervent denials that the Little Green Men were Kremlin troops.
But in any case, this is where some math skills (and that is all I have, some math skills) go a long way. And it doesn’t help assessments of lies if one mistakes what the people are claiming.
So if a USAV is created, I wonder which way the “immigrants” will flow?
its double what biden has been dumping on the open market, theres also the matter of several thousand passports that the venezuela vice president sold to al queda and hezbollah figures, also one of the leading organizers of the caravans,
through a company named dervent partners, which is affiliated with fusion, it launders regime cash, into South Florida real estate,
@miguel Cervantes @BigD
Yup and yup. This makes me sick, especially when you remember that even on an utterly soulless and practical level Venezuela is aligned with Russia and so this will likely not help. But on a moral level it is an abomination.
In case anybody doubted what our rulers are like…
Anything to weaken this country iran is also heavily involved in venezuela. And they have ties to hezbollah the organization that had killed the most americans till 9/11
Yes, a 2.3% decline in production could be very significant. Depends on the elasticity of both “other supplies” and demand.
Kate, Exactly. How can we increase global pollution? By letting Joe Biden decrease US oil production and increase Venezuelan oil production. Does Aggie know anything specific about pollution involved in production in various countries?
$6 a gallon gasoline the first week of November = red landslide
Its a dirtier crude i think the houston refinery is one of the only that can refine it
Its more of a political black eye than it is a solution to any domestic production shortfall. Venezuelan crudes are almost all ‘black oil’, that is to say, oil that has already lost most of its volatile components through natural oxidation over time – heavy, low-gravity asphaltic crudes.
It’s so poor (as a feedstock) that Venezuela must import condensate (which is a light, live oil that is so rich in volatiles it can sometimes be burned as gasoline, ‘drip gas’) from Iran in order to cut their crude sufficiently so that it can then be refined into something useful. That’s one reason – having to pay cash for foreign condensate – that Venezuela has gotten itself into such a predicament with their oil economy. Bear in mind: Venezuela has more proven reserves than Saudi Arabia. Not sure what the Administration thought they were going to accomplish by engaging in such a deal for such little practical return. It would be just about their speed to stuff it into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and contaminate the whole supply, while declaring ‘Victory’ with the support of their Adoring Press.
Incidentally, the Swedish military has come back with findings of explosion on the Nordstream pipeline. They’ve collected physical evidence for analysis, but the strong indications from what they have seen points to deliberate ‘gross sabotage’
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/kremlin-says-russia-not-invited-nord-stream-investigation-2022-10-06/
Their control of the crime scene location has been relinquished so the consortium can now get their permits and proceed with their own vessels and get a look at the damage. Hopefully the information will start to flow a little better now, so the vitally important ‘Cui Bono? work can continue !
Iran and Venezuela:
Two proud members of “The Western Liberal World Order”.
That and the fired or imprisoned anyonw with oil extracting experience why Rosneft (which is a rolling dumpster fire on its own) invested heavily to try to salvage it
“Does Aggie know anything specific about pollution involved in production in various countries?”
The First World countries are quite strictly regulated. There are legacy messes but these have been mostly cleaned up now. I worked on a project in Texas years ago, re-entering and properly plugging abandoned old wells drilled in the early 1900’s that were a leaking mess – most of them with no records at all.
But generally, ecology / environmental laws are so strict that any present-day work spends an inordinate amount of time running cleanly and minimizing environmental impact. The Deepwater Horizon / Macondo disaster inspired renewed efforts toward this. Producers are trying hard to cut down on wellsite flaring of evolved gas, but it’s hard to do this without encountering quite a bit of expense – I think eventually technology will solve that one expeditiously.
The Third World, that’s a different story. I’ve worked some disastrous fields in the Former Soviet Union that were flat out death traps. Methanol spilled every where, brine spills common, casual disposal of waste completely unregulated. Poison high-pressure gas, unmaintained fields with live high-tension electrical supply lines lying on the ground (the dead cow was the giveaway), so forth. Wells that were improperly abandoned and actively blowing out underground – the kind of stuff Red Adair would be called for.
The sensibilities are very different in these places. Actual ignorance plays a much bigger role, but also fear of government. An example: The Soviets thought nuclear devices were very handy things. They used some of them to move s mountains to create dams. In one field I worked in, they used them underground, to create storage caverns – similar in concept to our own Strategic Petroleum Reserves. We in the US created them by drilling into Salt Domes along the Gulf Coast, and then using solution-mining techniques – i.e. flushing fresh water at very high volumes to dissolve the salt in the middle of the salt dome, and by so doing, hollow out a chamber. Salt is a very good storage vessel, it’s plastic and self-sealing. Into this cavern we pump the strategic reserves. The 1970s Soviet method: Drill a hole into the salt, run a tactical nuke down the hole, cement it in, set it off. Didn’t work very well at the field I worked in, though – they leaked. But the good news was, at surface at least the Geiger counter returned with readings that were slightly elevated but within normal range.
Despite the lively discussion yesterday, I think that “Cui bono?” pretty much covers this situation.
@ Kate > “So, North American oil is bad, but oil from despotic regimes elsewhere, probably produced with fewer pollution controls, is good.”
Remember that these are the people who think that solar panels and wind turbines made with open-pit child-mined rare metals and slave-worker fabrication, using coal-fired power plants, is totally not a contributor to their personal carbon-free-non-polluting lifestyle.
Jester Naybor made a good comment on the Reynolds post:
My question: how much can Biden actually do before the midterms (hopefully) put the Republicans back in control of Congress?
Will Venezuela even try to re-activate their industry, knowing that the GOP might soon cancel the purchases? (Assuming they would, which is not a slam-dunk.)
And what good, for our producers, is a legal guarantee, given the state of the courts & judges who essentially ignore any law if it suits them?
PS President Trump and the GOP should have crafted a law early in his tenure that the XL pipeline was thereafter exempt from any more environmental studies, stays, or additional regulations, and could not be axed by the next president, even if they expected that to be him.
And all the activists, who generated more pollution protesting than the pipeline would ever have created, should have gone to jail — another example that the two-tiered “justice” system operates under both parties.
“…should have crafted a law…”
Ahhh, maybe he “should have crafted a law” that MADE EXECUTIVE ORDERS ILLEGAL?
(Or is that one for the “Heh” Files….?)
Thank you, Aggie, for that comparison of North American fields to other places.
Ditto Aggie. Real information. I knew of that US style salt dome tech. Very cool.
Trump wanted to fill the SPR when it was cheap. Dems voted it down then crowed about sticking it to Big Oil.
Madness.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/bidens-secret-promise-opec-backfires-shellenberger
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Who thinks that if Castro was El Jefe of Venezuela, Biden would refrain from seeking a deal with him?
Who thinks that if Chavez was El Jefe of Venezuela, Biden would refrain from seeking a deal with him?
Who thinks if Mao……
Who thinks if Pinochet was El Jefe of Venezuela, Biden would refrain from seeking a deal with him?
Goes to show that it’s ONLY the ideology of the individual that determines if demokrats will play nice with that person.
If Hitler and Stalin had been good pals – both being socialists
and hating capitalism – the demokrats would have no problems getting along with Hitler. You would have heard mention, barely, about his concentration camps to the same extent you heard, barely, about gulags.
We’ve got some serious “Alice in Wonderland” stuff going on here folks & if anyone can make a logical case for any of it being good for America…I’m all ears. Biden is negotiating with Iran to stop their nuclear ambitions (dubious) while Russia–who we are essentially in a proxy war with–mediates the negotiations…meanwhile Biden reaches out to socialist Venezuela–basically a vassal state of communist Cuba–offering to end economic sanctions hoping they’ll increase oil output–while following through on his campaign pledge to end the US fossil fuel industry two years after we reached energy independance for the first time since 1972.
There is an entire legal political corporate apparatus designed to prevent the correct energy strategy
Aggie, we set off a couple of nukes underground in Mississippi, I think, in 1964. It did not achieve the objectives, which, IIRC, were to create domes. It did mess up a bunch of folks’ houses.
The folks who were evactuated temporarily were compensated $10 for adults, $5 for kids.
Uhhh… Venezuela is, or was, a member of OPEC?
its the least efficient member of opec, once upon a time, it’s brainchild, perez alfonso, came from there, and he based it on his observations of the texas railroad commission, it was another 20 years before yamani, the saudi would make it a powerhouse,
Caracas Chronicles, July 27: One Million Hectares of Farmland for Iran
seeing as colombia has a ex marxist? guerilla as president, I found that a little surprising, petro, has decided not to tax the oil yet, plenty of venezuelans are starving now,