00:00We're going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere
00:06in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil
00:13infrastructure, and start making money for the country.
00:16President Trump's big plan to bring big oil, big American oil, back to Venezuela quickly
00:22just isn't realistic, at least not in the short term.
00:26At the turn of the century, Venezuela was producing more than three times as much oil as it's
00:31pumping out of the ground now.
00:32Since then, via sanctions, labor strikes, complete nutter, mismanagement, and fiscal problems,
00:39the production has just collapsed.
00:42It's down to about one million barrels of oil a day now, which is roughly one percent of
00:48the world's oil, and it would take years, five years or so at least, to double oil production,
00:55and that would cost at least $100 billion.
00:58One other problem with Venezuelan oil, even though it has the world's largest oil reserves,
01:03is there's only really two big buyers for it, the U.S. and China.
01:07It's hard to process.
01:08It's this extra heavy grade of crude.
01:10Most refineries worldwide can't process it.
01:13Now, the U.S. and China can buy more and more of it, but there's not going to be a lot of
01:17international buyers just lining up all over the world asking for this Venezuelan oil.
01:23That could certainly make more U.S. companies hesitant to go into Venezuela and spend the
01:28many billions of dollars needed.
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