Experts: Trump Plan to Exploit Venezuela’s Oil Would Be “Terrible for the Climate” |
A controlled gas burning at the El Palito refinery facility, in Puerto Cabello, Carabobo state, Venezuela, in January 2020.Juan Carlos Hernandez/ZUMA
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Donald Trump, by dramatically seizing Nicolás Maduro and claiming dominion over Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, has taken his “drill, baby, drill” mantra global. Achieving the president’s dream of supercharging the country’s oil production would be financially challenging—and if fulfilled, would be “terrible for the climate”, experts say.
Trump has aggressively sought to boost oil and gas production within the US. Now, after the capture and arrest of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, he is seeking to orchestrate a ramp-up of drilling in Venezuela, which has the largest known reserves of oil in the world—equivalent to about 300bn barrels, according to research firm the Energy Institute.
“The oil companies are going to go in, they are going to spend money, we are going to take back the oil, frankly, we should’ve taken back a long time ago,” the US president said after Maduro’s extraction from Caracas. “A lot of money is coming out of the ground, we are going to be reimbursed for everything we spend.”
US oil companies will “spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure… and start making money for the country,” Trump added, with his administration pressing Venezuela’s interim government to delete a law requiring oil projects to be half-owned by the state.
A 50 percent boost in Venezuelan oil production would result in more carbon pollution than major economies like the UK and Brazil emit.
Leading US oil businesses such as Exxon and Chevron have so far remained silent on whether they would spend the huge sums required to enact the president’s vision for Venezuela. But should Venezuela ramp up output to near its 1970s peak of 3.7 million barrels a day—more than triple current levels—it would further undermine the already faltering global........