President Donald Trump said he’s counting on American companies to rebuild Venezuela’s battered oil industry.
But the world’s largest proven oil reserves, tantalizing as they seem, may come with more risk than reward for the US oil giants, energy-industry watchers told CNN.
Extracting more oil from Venezuela would require rebuilding the country’s gutted oil infrastructure, which would cost, by Trump’s own telling, billions of dollars. And crude isn’t fetching the kind of prices that would make this kind of investment an easy call. Plus, refining Venezuela’s particular brand of crude oil is an expensive undertaking in itself.
It would be a hard sell in a politically stable country, let alone one in the throes of a political crisis following the ouster of its authoritarian president.
“This whole thing just leaves more questions than answers on the future political situation in Venezuela, and that’s going to be foremost on the minds of corporate planners and industry planners that want to consider the good opportunities there,” said Clayton Seigle, a senior fellow in the Energy Security and Climate Change Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Continue reading the complete article on the original source
