Good interview here with Ed Hirs of the University of Houston, conducted after the invasion of Venezuela.
Key points:
Venezuelan oil reserves are massive, but new players attempting to leverage them will need a lot of time, and capital. According to Hirs, ramping that production will not happen to an appreciable degree in the current Trump administration.
Hirs offered a calculation that if US drivers had paid the cost of the invasion of Iraq in their gasoline prices, that would have added $1.19 to the price of a gallon of gas. That did not happen of course, those costs were just charged to future US generations.
Oil companies that go in there might want some kind of guarantee that the MAGA administration will not pull the rug on any initial agreements – bearing in mind that this administration just abrogated legal contracts related to wind farms that have been blocked off the US coast.
Given the relative cost of oil from say, Canada, the economics “don’t make any sense” if the idea was to get cheaper prices, any time soon.
The price of a barrel of oil was $80/barrel a year ago, and has now dropped to less than $60, which is already hurting producers and workers in the US oil patch. Any additional price drops would be a hit to production in the US Permian basin, which needs a decent floor on price to be profitable.
It’s just as illegal and stupid as everything else Trump does.
We are dealing with the mad minds of people who think they can decree an entire line of battleships, using so-far non-existent weapons (rail guns and hypersonic missiles) and have the first one in the water within Trump’s current term.
Maybe, just maybe, they have decided that, since US oil refineries can’t use only US light crude, but need Canadian heavy crude in the blend, and since they can’t trust Canada to bow the knee and become the 51st state, they can use Venezuelan crude instead.
So then they can bomb Ottawa into submission, also before the end of the current term.
Because they really are that dangerously stupid
It’s not so much about having the things done as about their addiction to domination, destruction, and sadism, and about the people who are getting rich doing it.