On Tuesday evening, President Nicolás Maduro announced what in revolutionary newspeak is referred to as a sacudón (shake-up), otherwise known to the rest of the globe as cabinet reshuffle. The most noteworthy replacement happened in the Ministry of the Popular Power for Petroleum and Mining. Eulogio Del Pino, who is, and will continue to be, the chief of state oil company PDVSA, will be taking…
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been hearing dire warnings that unless Venezuela got its act together, it could just plain miss the short critical window of opportunity for monetizing its vast oil resources. “Other” technologies would inevitably catch up and make oil as irrelevant to the future as Whale Blubber was to our…
There is an interesting piece in the Business Section of the [increasingly indispensable] Wall Street Journal focused on PDVSA President Eulogio del Pino. I wouldn’t call it a profile per se – Del Pino did not make himself available to friend-of-the-blog Kejal Vyas, so he hovers over the story like a ghost. But the story claims del Pino…
It’s distressing to think about the Venezuelan government’s latest financial moves. Not for what the moves entail, necessarily, but because of the obvious reason that is driving them. First, the government announces it is tapping IMF holdings, about $389 million it held in its “Special Drawing Rights.” Then, they announced a new “agreement” (i.e. loan) with…
I once called it “Anzoátegui’s unnatural wonder”: A large accumulation of petroleum coke, which is located outside PDVSA’s José Antonio Anzoátegui Petrochemical Complex (better known to the locals as Jose Refinery). The coke mountain started way back in 2009 after a fire caused heavy damage to the docks used to transport the materials to export ships.…
Two interesting stories, from the indispensable foreign press. First, Bloomberg’s Anatoly Kurmanaev explores the lack of progress in reining in guns and munition, and how it shows the powerful sway of the military. He reminds us that, in theory, the military should have begun coding individual bullets as a way of tightening control over munition.…
On Friday, January 2nd, Brent crude oil prices closed at around US$57 per barrel. Two days later, an alarmed Nicolás Maduro announced that he would travel to China for the China-Celac Forum, and to several OPEC and non-OPEC countries “to continue high-level efforts (to create) a strategy for a recovery of oil prices.” Everyone knew Nicolás was…
My first post for FiveThirtyEight.com is up on their site now. Behold: It’s easy to lose sight of just how central Venezuela’s oil largesse has been to the Cuban state’s financial strategy. Following a landmark 2003 “Cooperation Agreement,” Venezuela has been sending 115,000 barrels a day to the island. The Cubans re-export some of the…
Today’s OPEC meeting in Vienna has all the makings of a turning point in the history of oil, and Venezuela. In agreeing not to cut oil production quotas in the face of a steep price decline – driving oil prices into the mesosphere – the organization has decided that business as usual … is over. The long-term challenge…
This has been a gruesome year for Venezuela. But as our economy collapses, economists are finding it hard to assess just how screwed up we are, since Venezuela’s Central Bank refuses to publish economic data. It’s also becoming very hard to forecast how clusterfucked we’ll be in 2015. In this context, economists have to come up with whatever they can.…
Imagine blaming the rain for the leaks in your ceiling. It doesn’t make sense, right? And yet this is what is going on in Venezuela’s public sphere, as government officials blame natural cycles in prices for the problems caused by their own mistakes. Predicting the behavior of any economic variable is a thankless task. Oil prices…
News filtered down this week that, to try to help hanging-by-a-thread Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu, the outgoing Senate Democratic leadership may allow a vote on the Keystone XL pipeline during congress’s lame-duck session. This would give Landrieu one more chance to suck up to her voters by … once more screwing Venezuela. The same Landrieu who…
While we were on break, a Reuters story came out about potential buyers going on a tour of our Citgo refineries – you know, the ones we are truly, definitely not going to sell. The tour got me thinking – if the government is going to go ahead with the advice of their French svengalis and…
Several Twitter users (including world-class freediver Carlos Coste) published multiple photographs of what looks to be a serious oil spill in the beach near the Amuay Oil Refinery in Falcón state. In the face of the evidence, PDVSA admitted the spill and, to their credit, did not use the word “sabotage” but blamed instead a strong…
Take it away, OilPrice.com … “Slumping oil prices are putting pressure on U.S. drillers. The number of active rigs drilling for oil and gas fell by their most in two months, according to the latest data from oil services firm Baker Hughes. There were 19 oil rigs that were removed from operation as of Oct.…
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