Venezuela—not the Middle East—is the wild card when it comes to the near future of the oil industry, BP’s chief executive Bob Dudley told CNBC on the sidelines of the Abu Dhabi Petroleum Exhibition & Conference. “I think Venezuela is just defying economic gravity and I think that’s a real wild card,” Dudley said, referring to the combination of falling oil production, severe recession, political instability, and sanctions that the South American nation has endured in the last four years. Venezuela has the largest crude oil reserves in the world, according to BP estimates, but it has found it increasingly difficult to exploit these, especially amid falling international prices and resource mismanagement by state-owned PDVSA. Added to this is growing international concern that the government of Nicolas Maduro is stifling democracy in a brutal manner, which most recently led to the European Union this week slamming Caracas with a […]