This is earlier than I expected, but it will be a long road.
DB2
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Why is that earlier than you expected? This appears to be imports, not production. Increasing imports only required redirecting Venezuelan oil from other destinations to go into the U.S. It’s not surprising that we were able to do that relatively soon.
Production is the hard part. It’s currently at 1.20 mpbd, compared to 1.14 mbpd just before the U.S. action to remove Maduro. Which, I guess, is something - but it’s not a really significant increase.
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Ah, so this is just crude that is being shipped to the US rather than China.
DB2
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For the most part, yes.
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2023, following the easing of U.S. sanctions, Chevron shipped an average of approximately 132,000 barrels per day (bpd) of Venezuelan crude oil to the United States.
In 2019 the administration blocked all oil imports from Venezuela. Chevron had been refining Venezuela Crude for decades. The Deer Park Refinery located in Houston is configured to handle the dense, heavy, and sour crude profiles historically produced in Venezuela.
What does China have to do with it?
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China’s where the oil was going when they were under our sanctions. Since we’ve dropped the sanctions for…reasons, our oil imports from Venezuela have massively increased. But that doesn’t reflect much change in the physical oil being produced in VZ. Just oil being shifted away from China back to the U.S.
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Due to central government controls on domestic economic activity. The refiners in Shandong province would not have specifically configured their coking and asphalt-processing units to handle Venezuela Crude had not our central government intervened in economic activity in the private sector
Of course. We imposed sanctions on Venezuela, so they could no longer export their oil to the U.S. They wanted to still sell their oil, so they exported it to other countries. At first it also went to places like India and Malaysia, but then when secondary sanctions hit it pretty much went mostly to China.
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