re: The US now controls 65 billion barrels of proven oil reserves in Venezuela

quote:

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cant our gulf coast refineries refine it?

Yes, they were built to handle heavy sour crude

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Don’t they mix it with Louisiana Sweet and west Texas Intermediate to aid in the refining process?

Venezuelan Crude is very sour and has a high sulfur content. It is also very thick compared to Texas and Louisiana crudes.

Word is that one of the first batches from Venezuela was spilled in the oil spill at LOOP earlier this year.

Take it for what it's worth, here's Washington Post reporting on details hot off the press:

The reported structure is:

100-year rights to develop the 17 fields.
A new private oil company/joint venture will hold those rights.
The U.S. will have approximately 55% effective control/output.
A Venezuelan private operator will hold the remaining interest.
The deal is expected to attract roughly $100 billion in private investment.
Venezuela is projected to receive more than $209 billion in tax revenue over time.

Trump says the arrangement will cost American taxpayers nothing and eventually increase U.S. oil supplies and replenish the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. ?
The Washington Post +1

And here's the interesting part: the private Venezuelan company
The company at the center of the arrangement appears to be North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP), controlled by Venezuelan businessman Alejandro Betancourt.

This is where the reporting gets particularly interesting. The Washington Post reports that NABEP is expected to be the major Venezuelan private participant, while the new venture would receive the 100-year rights to the fields. ?

Haven't seen an English translation yet. My high school Spanish comprehension understood her to say "It's a really good deal for us."

DP

quote:

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Independent analysts noted the arithmetic fails on that timeline: the 30 to 50 million barrels Trump floated is less than half a day of global consumption, the 65 billion is an in-ground estimate rather than available supply, and any price effect would take years. Miller’s briefing goes underneath that objection to the more fundamental one: Venezuelan crude is the wrong substance to fix the shortage Americans feel at the pump. It is not a magical fix. In the near term it is not a fix at all.

The point most likely to be missed
The shortage that bites right now is in product — diesel and jet fuel — and extra-heavy Venezuelan crude is not product. It is refinery feedstock. You cannot relieve a middle-distillate shortage with a barrel that still has to be diluted, blended, upgraded, coked, and hydroprocessed before it yields a usable gallon of anything.

This is why the “turn Venezuela on” reflex fails on its own terms. Even setting aside whether Caracas can produce more, the barrels that already exist do not add supply where the market is tight. Prompt US cargoes would largely be diverted from Venezuela’s current buyers — China, India, Europe — not created on top of global production. That reshuffles refinery slates and trade routes; it does not repair a physical shortage. A barrel moved from a Chinese refiner to a US one is a change of address, not a new barrel, and certainly not a new gallon of jet fuel.

Why the feedstock gap is binding
The nature of the crude is the reason. Roughly three-quarters of Venezuelan production through 2028 is expected to be heavy, extra-heavy, or bitumen, with the Orinoco Belt supplying about 60%. That material is the raw input at the very front of the conversion process; the finished distillate barrel sits many capital-intensive steps downstream — coking and hydroprocessing capacity, hydrogen, refinery uptime, yields, distribution — none of which a cargo of Merey crude supplies. The price tells the same story: Merey 16 averaged $67.36/bbl in July 2026, about $12.35 under the OPEC basket, the market pricing in the cost of converting this crude into something useful. Venezuela cannot repair a current crude or middle-distillate shortage, because the missing piece was never the crude.

The supply side only reinforces it
Nor can the volume be conjured quickly. July 2026 output was near 1.1 million b/d — about a third of the 3.4 million b/d peak of 1998 — and the system that would lift it has been hollowed out: the EIA documents pipelines over 50 years old, power outages, constrained diluent, and impaired refineries, with PDVSA estimating some $8 billion for pipelines alone. Rystad puts full-cycle breakevens at $70–$80/bbl or higher and its base case adds only about 194,000 b/d through 4Q 2028; a return toward 3 million b/d would take well over $150 billion across 10–15 years. Large in-ground reserves, Miller stresses, are not deliverable supply — and the 65 billion barrels in the President’s announcement is exactly that kind of number: a resource estimate, not a delivery schedule.

The revealed preference: what the majors already told the White House
The strongest confirmation is not a model but the behavior of the companies that would have to fund the rebuild. At the White House on 9 January 2026, shortly after the US removal of Maduro, Trump insisted the industry would spend more than $100 billion to rebuild Venezuela’s oil sector. The room did not agree. ExxonMobil’s Darren Woods told the President to his face that Venezuela is, as it stands, “uninvestable” — that durable legal frameworks, commercial terms, and stability must come first, and that Exxon would send only a technical team to assess. ConocoPhillips’ Ryan Lance said the system needs major restructuring first; both firms had their assets expropriated under Chávez, and by 30 January both Exxon and Chevron said they had no plans to raise Venezuela spending that year. The figures put before that meeting matched Miller’s: Rystad estimated roughly $110 billion merely to double output by 2030, and closer to $185 billion to climb back toward 2000-era levels.

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LINK

Look at this beta bitch still melting

Well, thanks to the Iran war, the supers will have an extra 50 billion or so in revenue they weren’t expecting. Hmmm.