Comment by woodpanel
4 days ago
> The US has no use for Venezuelan oil.
Actually it's just the exact opposite. The US might be the biggest oil producer, but it still imports 60% of its oil that it uses from Canada. Why is that? Apparently because US infrastructure was built for heavy oil, not the light version the US produces.
Well, well, well ... It just so happens that Venezuela sits on the worlds largest repository of heavy oil.
The US consumes about 20 mil bbls of oil per day and imports around 4 mil bbls per day from Canada, about 20% of US consumption. Total oil imports is about 6 mil bbls/day, with about 2/3 of imports coming from Canada.
Two fun facts: 1) the US is now the largest producer of crude oil on the planet and 2) the US exports about 4 mil bbs of oil per day. Venezuela is a distant #18 at around 1 mil bbls/day
And lastly, pretty much anything you can distil from heavy crude, you can also distil from light crude, just less of it (by volume). There's a reason tar, asphalt and such is so cheap, it's made from the distillation waste products.
> 20 mil bbls of oil per day
Almost double that of Saudi-Arabia, roughly 20 times that of Venezuela
Imported heavy crude rose from 12% 50 years ago to 70% today.
> pretty much anything you can distil from heavy crude, you can also distil from light crude
You can, but at what cost and where? The largest raffineries are apparently built for heavy crude and you can’t just retrofit them to handle light crude.
> with about 2/3 of imports coming from Canada
There are just two other countries equipped with large enough resources to compete for that market share: Russia and Venezuela