“over the past twenty years, China has become the operational core of Venezuela’s oil industry. Not merely as a buyer, but as a builder. China provided refinery technology, heavy crude upgrading systems, infrastructure design, control software, spare parts logistics (…) Remove the Chinese engineers. Remove the technicians who understand the control logic. Remove the maintenance supply chains. Remove the software support. What remains is not a functioning oil industry waiting to be ‘liberated’, but an inert shell.”
Conclusion: “Converting Venezuela’s Chinese-built oil sector into an American one would take three to five years, minimum.”
Financial analyst Lucas Ekwame hits the major points. Venezuela produces superheavy oil as thick as tar. It doesn’t just flow; it needs to be melted to reach the surface, and after extraction, it hardens again, requiring diluent: no less than 0.3 barrels of diluent need to be imported for each exported barrel.
Compound it with Venezuela’s energy infrastructure shaped by China and at the same time suffering years of American sanctions, even worse than over Iraq in the early 2000s, and neo-Caligula’s faulty oil “strategy” becomes obvious.
