Doonesbury Say What

[thewayne]

"No one wants to go in there when a random f***ing tweet can change the entire foreign policy of the country."
-- oil industry investor, about Venezuela

I was reading a quote from an Exxon exec, talking about how all of Exxon's assets had been nationalized by Venezuela TWICE. Yeah, not a place where oil companies are going to be eager to rush back in to rebuild their infrastructure.

Not going to bother talking about a certain person's habit of changing international policy via social media posts, waste of finger and mental energy.

Comments

[dewline]

So there's some people in the fossil fuel business who do have something resembling good sense. Grateful for that, as far as it goes.

[disneydream06]

UGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hugs, Jon

[white_aster]

Just goes to show a certain person knows absolutely nothing about real business. The difference between real business acumen and somebody just gambling.

[graydon]

Venezuela has the Orinico Belt, which is not generally speaking the good stuff; there's a lot of it, but it's frequently tar. The good stuff is in Guyana, offshore. Which production is rapidly expanding, mostly profiting Exxon, and subject to a territorial dispute with Venezula.

Much of these events make sense as a thing the US petrofaction wants to happen if you look at it as a tripartite "there's no territorial dispute if there's no Venezula/Guyana will get the message about wanting a larger share of the profits or control just fine/let's take out the Russian regional ally, shall we?" action. (Russia is perhaps still capable of providing political cover for nationalization; the current on-the-ground outcome is that Russia's influence has been shown to be strictly hypothetical, since the region is in range of direct American power projection from CONUS.)

tl;dr it's protecting the investment offshore in Guyana, which the oil companies do want to make, without getting that investment/extraction into the news. (I mean, officially, this is all about drugs. Any oil theft from Venezuela will exist as reparations for claims of drug damage.)

[thewayne]

No, he's never demonstrated great business acumen.  He licenses his name on everything and plays golf.

[thewayne]

Interesting info, thanks.  I knew a little about the Guyana resources, but not a lot.

[ionelv]

Despite the general chaos generated almost daily from two thumbs at Mar-a-Lago, oil execs MIGHT invest in Venezuela if any incentives are there, e.g. big orange stick, tax payer funded capital outlays, secret written future promises of military intervention if needed, Epstein/Russian blackmail shit, etc. Don't count US oil investment in Venezuela out just yet.