By Javier E David In a country where oil wealth has typically been controlled up by oil companies, the concept of the U.S. harnessing its energy boom to shore up its frayed public finances may be hard to conceive. Although state control of natural resources tends to evoke images of authoritarian countries like Venezuela or… Keep reading →
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s death is not likely to result in near-term changes to the Venezuelan oil industry or global energy landscape, but it could ultimately result in political change that would reopen the country’s energy industry to foreign investment.
As news of Chavez’s death swept through IHS CERAWeek, the world’s largest conference for energy executives, in Houston on Tuesday afternoon, participants flocked to televisions, looking for news on the political future of a country that has the second largest oil reserves in the world. Keep reading →
It appears increasingly likely that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez will not return to power following his latest cancer treatment in December and analysts are considering the implications of a post-Chavez regime for one of the largest crude oil producers in the world.
Venezuela holds some of the world’s largest oil reserves and is the second largest Opec oil exporter to the US. Oil revenue accounts for a bulk of the government’s income and has largely been used to fund Chavez’s wide-ranging social programs. But the country’s oil industry – which is essentially state-owned company PDVSA – has been struggling with declining production rates at mature fields, along with other problems. Keep reading →
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Sunday that his government should pull out of a World Bank-affiliated arbitration body and won’t recognize its decisions. Exxon Mobil Corp. is one of more than a dozen companies with arbitration cases against Venezuela pending before the World Bank-affiliated International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, or ICSID. Chavez announced his decision while referring to a more than $900 million award that Exxon Mobil recently won in another arbitration case before the International Chamber of Commerce. This article is a linkout from DailyFinance: http://srph.it/y5o0pr
Jared Anderson
Conway Irwin
Peter Gardett