Can Venezuela Meet Trump’s Oil Pledge?

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00:00Let's get into that a little bit more, because President Trump says Venezuela, as you said,

00:04will give up to 50 million barrels of oil to the U.S., which is worth somewhere in the region of

00:11$2.8 billion. What do you make of this prediction by Donald Trump? And how many years could it take

00:20to turn over that volume of money? Well, as far as the oil is concerned,

00:26I mean, this is heavy oil from the Orinoco belt, which produces most of Venezuela's oil these days,

00:33and that has been stored in the port of Jose on the Caribbean coast, which is the tanks there are

00:41said to be absolutely full to overflowing. So this is oil presumably belonging to PDVSA,

00:49the Venezuelan state oil company. And that is now, it's there, it's ready, and that can be

00:56shipped. As far as increasing Venezuela's output of oil, that is a much bigger task and a much

01:05bigger unknown. Executives of the big American oil companies that used to be in Venezuela,

01:14but left after the nationalizations in the early years of this century, that's ExxonMobil and

01:20ConocoPhillips. They are said to be meeting the president or his representatives sometime this

01:28week to discuss going back to Venezuela. The president has said that the oil companies are

01:36eager to get into Venezuela and are there ready to go and they will be increasing oil output from

01:45Venezuela for the benefit of the people of Venezuela as well as the American people. But of course,

01:52this is a very, very big undertaking. As has been said, the infrastructure of the oil industry in

01:59Venezuela has been very, very run down indeed in recent years. A lot of experienced personnel have

02:06left even from PDVSA. And the investment needed to get the industry producing again, even anything

02:18like the 3 million barrels a day that they used to produce until about 10, 15 years ago, it's going to

02:24take many billions of dollars. I've seen a figure of 110 billion dollars and probably take a decade.

02:30So, thank you very much.