Will Venezuela Invade Guyana for Oil?

I’ve gotten a handful of questions regarding Venezuela invading the South American state of Guyana due to economic challenges and oil discoveries. The short answer is that I’m not worried about this, but here’s three reasons why.

This would be a difficult trek for the Venezuelans given the lack of infrastructure connecting the two countries. Venezuela also lacks a functional military that would be able to carry out this invasion. Lastly, the oil production in Guyana is predominantly offshore, so a land-based invasion is just impractical if the goal is to seize someone else’s oil projects. This one’s a nonstarter.

So, unless Venezuela magically fixes all of their military shortcomings, there’s no real concern of an invasion of Guyana. And that means the US can forget about this area and focus on the bigger fish for now.

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TranscripT

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado, taking one from the Ask Peter List today. And is it do I worry about Venezuela invading the South American state of Guiana? For those of you unfamiliar with the backstory of Venezuela, until roughly 2000 was one of the world’s major oil producers kick it out somewhere between two and a half and four and a half million barrels a day based on the environment. 

Since then, a guy by the name of Hugo Chavez, who is a populist who is completely incapable of doing math, took over and ran the place for about 15 years before he died. And his successor, who was a poor quality bus driver, took over. No joke. And they’ve run the place into the ground. So total production now is no more than a million barrels per day. 

And even that’s a little touchy. And in fact, we’re probably going to see a new round of American sanctions go on it in a couple of weeks here, in which case even that low level is probably going to fall. And I can see a situation before the end of the decade where Venezuela actually becomes a net oil importer because of their inability to operate their own fields. 

So that’s the back story. Guyana is a another former colony or recent colony just to the east of the country with has a population of like three, even 3 million, just three. Anyway, they found oil offshore a few years ago. And so the American company, Exxon has been operating there ever since. And I think they’re supposed to add a million barrels per day this year. 

I’ll be back to you on that one. But it’s definitely over half a million barrels a day. It’s been the most promising new oil play in the world that is not in the U.S. shale patch. So the idea would be that Venezuela, to avoid a state collapse, which is a very real danger now, would pick up and move over to Guyana to take the oil and the income. 

No is the short version. I don’t worry about this. Three reasons. Number one, there is no infrastructure linking the two countries. The corner of northeastern Venezuela that abuts Guyana is full on jungle and there’s not even a single road of note. So the Venezuelans would have to use their Navy or the Air Force, and they don’t have either of those things. 

Which brings us to factor number two. They don’t really have an army either. When Chavez took over, the military was broadly opposed to him in the ongoing power struggle. And the way he solved that was by bribing the generals with the money that would have gone for equipment and training. Well, you asked for that over 20 years. You now have way too many generals in order to run the military and no functional military. 

So if the Venezuelan army was able to go get into one place, they would just kind of walk as a mob into the jungle and die. And any that did manage to cross over into Guyana could easily be defeated by the Marines at the U.S. embassy, all six of them. There’s just there’s not a military question here. And then the third issue is that I don’t think it’s going to happen because all of the oil production is offshore and Venezuela is in its heyday, even when it was well run, didn’t operate a single offshore project. 

So they would have to what, take over the country and rowboat out to the facilities, take them over, and then kindly ask Exxon to keep operating them, but to send all the income to Caracas. Yeah. No, not going to happen. So there’s no need for the U.S. to get involved here because there’s no danger whatsoever. Although I got to admit, it’d be hilarious to watch Venezuela try.

Venezuelan Oil Sector: Biden Lifts Sanctions

The Biden administration has suspended some sanctions on the Venezuelan oil industry thanks to Maduro’s (ever-so) slight easing of political restrictions. While this may pump some air back into the lungs of the oil sector, it will take a lot more to get Venezuela back to significant levels.

The history of Venezuelan crude is about as thick and complex as its dino juice. Back in the day, the US built infrastructure to accommodate the viscous crude coming from the south. Once that crude became unreliable (in more than one way), the US closed the door on those imports.

Now that some sanctions have been lifted, we’ll likely see some more steady flows of Venezuelan crude into the system…but it will take much more foreign investment and reestablishing of trust and reliability to revive the Venezuelan oil sector.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

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First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

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Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Seattle, Washington. It is the 20th of October, although you’re probably not going to see this one for a while because there’s a lot going on. We have a bit of a stack in front of us. Today, the Biden administration in Washington announced the suspension of some of the sanctions that are in place on the Venezuelan oil industry, which will allow a number of companies in the United States to increase their investments legally, as well as a number of refineries in the United States to increase their imports of crude from the country. 

Things have been yo-yoing, but in general going down over the course of the last decade. Venezuela today is exporting significantly less than a million barrels a day. In fact, there have been some times where it’s almost dropped to zero, and American imports of that crude have also been dropping proportionately. And in fact, at some point, there have been several months where we didn’t import any at all.

I don’t think it’s ever gotten above a half a million the last two years anyway. It’s not a lot anymore for an economy that uses or processes over 20 million barrels a day. Okay. What’s going on? Okay. Number one, the Venezuelan system is run by a guy by the name of Nicolas Maduro, who is a former bus driver with no executive experience until he took over from Hugo Chavez, who was a kleptomaniac who basically stole the country into the ground.

And so under Chavez and especially under Maduro, the mismanagement has been extreme. And they and their allies have basically stolen everything that wasn’t nailed down, including the lot of stuff that was nailed down. A lot of this stuff was really dumb. So like, you know, you’d have a a power plant, so they’d steal the generators. I mean, it’s like the degree to which we had a kleptocracy here is pretty extreme.

This is not socialism. Let’s be clear. Socialism is where the government plays a directing role in the government. This was just flat out theft, a very different sort of system. We should be afraid of this sort of system. Anyway, what Maduro has done, he’s loosened up some of his restrictions when it comes to political pluralism in the country and basically allowing the opposition to participate in a series of elections.

And the United States, as sanctions are related to those elections. So by basically being a little bit less of a prick, the United States has decided to lessen some of the sanctions. We’ve got three things going on here. First of all, the one that’s closest to home and probably the least significant is the Biden administration’s official mantra is that high gasoline prices in the United States are largely a product of decisions that are made in the various OPEC producing countries rather than his own policies at home.

Which is a little weird because the United States is the world’s largest producer of crude and arguably now the second largest exporter in gross terms. So, I mean, the solution to our gasoline issue is to build up refining capacity in the United States. So we’re not dependent on crudes that come from abroad. Which brings us to the second issue, which is the crude that comes from abroad.

American refiners knew, knew, and they were right back in the seventies and eighties that the global supply of crude, the chemistry of that crude was changing. And we had used up most of the conventional crude that was light and sweet, which is another way of saying that it has very few impurities, whether it’s sulfur and mercury. And that light sweet stuff tends to be very, very easy to refine.

So what we did is we invested hundreds of billions of dollars in retooling our entire industrial base in the refining sector so that we could take heavy, sour crudes which were thick, maybe even solid at room temperature, and may have been like three, even 4% sulfur by weight and process that into finished fuels. The idea is we can use our technical acumen and our better capital position to take the world’s crappiest crudes and refine them into the world’s highest value add products.

And so the margin buy low, sell high. You know how that works has worked very, very well for them over the last 30 years. And Venezuela is one of the sources of the heaviest crude in the world. And there are very, very, very few refineries in the world that can process this stuff except for the United States. And so when Chavez basically led his country on to a anti-American jihad and Maduro moved R0 excuse me, stuck with the ideology, American refiners became less and less interested because the Venezuelans were simultaneously driving their own industry to the ground.

So the crude quality became very erratic and the delivery volumes became erratic, and then delivery reliability became very erratic. So even though they liked the chemistry of the crude, it became too wily for them to depend upon it. So they’ve shifted primarily to other sources. With Canadian oil sands now being the preferred input. This raises the possibility in the midterm that we might be seeing some more Venezuelan crude come in because honestly, there aren’t a lot of other places for it to go.

There are a couple of refineries in India, in China that can take it in limited volumes. But then you have to ship it either around the Americas or through Panama and recombine into a larger tanker on the other side of Panama and send it across the Pacific. It’s literally more than halfway around the world, if you want to do by supertanker, because you have to go all the way around the southern tip of South America and then cross the Pacific the long way in order to get it to a destination.

So the economics of that are questionable at best. And the only reason shipments have gone that direction is because the Venezuelans have taken huge hits. So what usually happens now is Indian or Chinese or Russian traders buy the crude in Venezuela and then ships ship to the north and to the United States and pocket the difference, leaving it to the Venezuelan government to hold the bag.

It’s a delightful little trade that is only possible because of really stupid ideologies, but it happens. Okay. The third the future of the industry. Venezuelan crude is thick, it’s viscous. And some of the stuff in Orinoco, you have to basically inject steam that several hundred degrees into the formation just to make it liquid in the first place. That means it has very high development costs, basically for every barrel of production you’re going to get, you’re going to have to sink 4 to $8000 into the well, giving up one of the world’s higher development costs.

It’s not clear that the foreigners are going to be that interested in investing when you’ve got political issues, you’ve got technical issues, you’ve got infrastructure issues. And that’s even before you consider that the United States could always slap sanctions on again. So a small to moderate increase out of Venezuela, I think makes a certain amount of sense. But I would be really shocked if over the next year that amounts to more than maybe 300,000 barrels a day.

I mean, that’s that’s not nothing. And considering what’s starting to bubble up in the Middle East with Iran, that might be really necessary. But if there is going to be a game changer in the industry, it’s not going to be Venezuela. That makes the difference. Now, I understand there’s a lot of people that thinking it might and because it has in the past, if you remember back to the oil shocks of 73 to 79, it was Venezuela that broke with OPEC and turned open the taps and expanded their production footprint in order to break the Arab oil embargo.

And that had very long lasting implications for the market and for geopolitics. But you had a very different political system in Venezuela at the time. Back then, it was the most advanced of the Latin American countries with a very technical government, with high education standards and pretty good infrastructure. Now, after 25 years of slide, it’s at the bottom of most of those measures, and it just can’t do hardly any of the work itself.

It has to come from abroad. And the Venezuelans are going have to rebuild a degree of trust and reliability before the investment will flow in in the billions. And that is exactly what it would require. Okay. I’m.

No Deal with the Devils Just Yet

In light of recent moves by the US to lift some targeted energy sanctions on Venezuela to help bolster energy sanctions against Russia, we are sharing an earlier video on the difficulty the Biden administration would face in trying to rely on “partners” like Venezuela, Iran and Saudi Arabia to limit the pain of sanctioning a major global oil and gas supplier. The challenges facing the global energy market are also a central theme in my upcoming book, The End of the World is just the Beginning, out June 14. Pre-order info here.

In an effort to ease Europe’s transition from Russian energy, the Biden administration has given the green light to two European oil companies—Italy’s Eni and Spain’s Repsol—to ship Venezuelan oil to Europe (and nowhere else) to cover debts.

This resumes a practice that was halted in 2019 by US-imposed sanctions. While this move will not drastically improve Europe’s situation, or affect global oil prices at all, it will boost Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s image in his country. For several years, the US has recognized Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s “Interim President,” despite his inability to oust President Maduro, even with ample US support.

Now the US is in the awkward position of returning to the negotiation table with Mr. Maduro, officially not the president of Venezuela, and relying on his government to ease global energy shortages. Interestingly, the Biden administration also granted permission to Chevron to partially resume operations in Venezuela, meaning the US supermajor can perform basic upkeep of its wells that it operates jointly with state-run oil giant PDVSA. Perhaps this is a hint at more to come, but at the moment Venezuelan crude will not be making its way to the US–nor will the Russian supplies of heavy crude Washington had been buying to replace it.

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:
 
First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.
 
Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.
 
And then there’s you.
 
Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

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