Comment by monerozcash
7 days ago
I seriously doubt either China or Russia could manage to extract significant quantities of Venezuelan oil at a profit even if the US lifted all sanctions and completely forgot about Venezuela.
The costs of getting production set up at are so high compared to the relatively bleak outlook for the oil market, it's likely that Venezuelan oil isn't a hugely attractive proposition for anyone.
China is desperate, and also the enemy of essentially every source of oil ... "except" Venezuela (disregarding the fact that of course Maduro can't be trusted, and thus isn't really an ally of China. More accurately they're both desperate and might be able to help one another).
Russia is also desperate. And is extracting oil in Venezuela easier than doing it while under Ukrainian bombardment? Good question but we can summarize: extracting oil inside Russia is failing, thanks to Putin's 3-day special military operation ... and they've already had to import fuel twice in the past 6 months, despite how utterly ridiculous that is: the country that out-produced Saudia Arabia when it comes to oil needed to import fuel.
China is moving away from oil at such a pace that any massive development of first the extraction technologies for Venezuela and then the actual infrastructure would probably take too long to be particularly useful.
Venezuela is also simply too far from China to be a reliable source of oil.
And yet Chinese government officials were in discussions mere hours before the US attacked. There were also discussions with Russia and Iran going on.
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