Category: Latin America

Italian energy company Eni reviewing global oil market conditions with its counterparts in Venezuela. (UPI/Shutterstock/num_skyman) CARACAS, Venezuela, Dec. 3 (UPI) — While providing few specifics, Italian energy company Eni said Wednesday it was reviewing current world oil market conditions with its Venezuelan counterparts. Eni Chief Executive Officer Claudio Descalzi met in Caracas with his counterpart at Petroleos de Venezuela , Eulogio Del Pino. Both sides, the Italian company said, discussed developments at the Junin-5 and Perla oil fields, two of the largest oil fields discovered in recent years. Junin-5, located in Venezuela’s offshore Orinoco oil belt, is expected to produce about 240,000 barrels of oil per day at its maximum. The Perla field holds an estimated 17 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. "The meeting was also an opportunity to analyze the global energy scenario especially in light of the recent events that have heavily affected the world oil […]

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As Venezuelan Foreign Minister Rafael Ramirez urged fellow OPEC members to cut oil production at one point during last week’s three-hour meeting in Vienna, the split in the group quickly became clear. Eight countries — including those from Angola and Nigeria, which are, like Venezuela, among the hardest hit by the five-month rout in crude prices — embraced a reduction, according to five people briefed on the meeting. Absent from that list, though, was the most important man in the room, Saudi Arabian Oil Minister Ali Al-Naimi , who led a group of four Persian Gulf nations in voicing dissent, the people said. And with that, the push for a cut, which would require unanimous backing, was shot down, leaving OPEC’s daily output target at 30 million barrels and triggering a 10 percent collapse in prices by the next day. The disagreement cements the formation of two camps that […]

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VLADIMIR PUTIN pointed out that the Russian currency’s recent loss of value had a silver lining. “ We earlier sold a product worth $1 and got 32 rubles for it,” he told the TASS news agency. “And now we get 45 rubles for the same product costing $1. Budget revenues have increased and not decreased.” That simple math works for big energy producers like Russia, where government revenues come mostly from sales of oil and gas for dollars. When world energy prices drop, a depreciating currency can allow a government to keep spending at home and cushion the shock. Not everyone gets it, however. Unfortunately for Venezuelans, Mr. Putin’s lesson is lost on their own leaders, who are continuing to preside over an accelerating — and dangerous — economic collapse in one of the world’s biggest petroleum powers. The price of Venezuela’s heavy oil dropped below $70 a barrel […]

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By Kejal Vyas CARACAS–Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro announced plans on Friday to cut public spending, beginning with his own salary, as the price of oil continues its slump. The slide in crude prices of more than 30% since the summer has added a new layer of concern for Mr. Maduro, whose popularity, polls show, has dropped to a record low. The South American country is struggling with soaring inflation as well as a dollar crunch that has led to shortages of food and consumer goods. Venezuela’s basket of heavy crude and petroleum products tumbled 89 cents to end the week at $68.08 a barrel, the lowest in more than four years, the oil ministry reported. "I don’t take this blow from the drop in oil prices badly," Mr. Maduro said in a televised address to industry workers at the Miraflores presidential palace. "I take it as an opportunity to […]

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In the aftermath of OPEC’s failure to cut oil production, Russia has been acting surprisingly sanguine, perhaps as a result of less leverage in its system as compared to America’s own high yield-funded shale complex – now that it is a race to who will default first and be forced to take production offline – with Putin today saying “Russia will cope with the rout in crude oil”,  and adding that “we are satisfied overall with the situation and do not see anything so extraordinary in what is happening. Winter is coming and I am sure that the market will come into balance again in the first quarter or toward the middle of next year.” Maybe it will, or maybe not, if indeed as those with a working frontal cortex suggest the plunge in crude prices is merely a function of a collapse in global demand now that the […]

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(Updates with arbitration details in fifth paragraph.) Nov. 26 (Bloomberg) –- ConocoPhillips (COP) Petrozuata BV asked a Texas judge to let it investigate claims Venezuela ’s state-owned oil company is secretly liquidating U.S. assets to avoid paying a potential multibillion-dollar arbitration award over the nationalization of ConocoPhillips’ assets in 2007. Petroleos de Venezuela ’s principal U.S. asset is Houston-based Citgo Petroleum Corp., which owns three refineries and a distribution network comprised of numerous pipelines and terminals. The Venezuelan government publicly said in September and October that it was no longer trying to sell Citgo, in deals with price tags estimated from $7 billion to $15 billion, according to court papers. “The available evidence indicates that PDVSA is liquidating its interests in Citgo to remove the proceeds from the United States to Venezuela or elsewhere with the specific intent to hinder, delay or defraud its creditors,” including the company’s “ability […]

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Venezuela is seeking help from nations outside of OPEC to halt a collapse in global crude prices, adding a new twist to oil-market diplomacy with nine days to go until the group’s next meeting. Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s president, told state television yesterday that he was coordinating with Russia to hold a meeting “very soon” with countries that aren’t members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, as well as those within the group, to defend the price of oil. Venezuela and other Latin American countries have been among the hardest hit by plunging prices in part because the slump has been caused by surging supplies in North America. Combined output from the U.S. and Canada rose last year to the highest since at least 1965 as producers tapped stores locked in shale-rock formations and oil sands, according to BP Plc data. “I don’t see anyone in non-OPEC volunteering to […]

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