…oil cavalry?
For years, your Eyewitness and John Public were informed that the US’s great strategic objective was Venezuela’s oil!! Forget democracy, forget geopolitics, forget all the lofty speeches. President Trump himself candidly admitted that removing Mad Maduro was about ensuring American control over the world’s largest proven petroleum reserves. Fair enough – at least his honesty is refreshing compared to dithering Joe Biden – and he must be complimented for this!!
But there’s just one tiny problem – where the heck are the oil companies that we’re told are pulling the strings of American foreign policy and prompted Mad Maduro’s extraction?? Six months have passed, and not a single convoy of hard-hatted petroleum engineers out of Texas has thundered triumphantly across the Orinoco!! No flotillas of drilling rigs appearing on the horizon across the Caribbean Sea!! Exxon, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and the rest of America’s oil aristocracy descended from the old Seven Sisters seem to’ve misplaced the memo announcing their imperial appointment!!
Your Eyewitness can just see the executives around a table in Houston staring nervously at spreadsheets in front of them: “Yes, Venezuela has enormous reserves…But can we actually get the oil out and make money to please our shareholders?” Numbing silence!! Turns out that conquering an oil field in political speeches is considerably easier than extracting heavy crude from ageing infrastructure after decades of underinvestment!! Oil – especially the tar-like Venezuelan kind – inconveniently refuses to respond to campaign rhetoric or agendas!!
Perhaps the oil honchos have discovered that reserves ain’t the same thing as production!! Those 300 billion barrels buried underground remain stubbornly unimpressed by press conferences!! Pipelines still need repairs; drilling rigs gotta be derusted, and wells still demand expensive infusions of mud!! Not to mention reimbursement for previous nationalised assets!! Geology, unlike politics, can’t be bullied into submission!!
The whole affair is beginning to resemble Texas Barons of yore buying the world’s largest cattle ranch only to discover that cows require feeding!! For years, Venezuela’s oil was portrayed as the glittering prize that would sustain American energy dominance into the next century! Instead, the promised petroleum bonanza has become a waiting game worthy of Godot – waiting for Big Oil!!
Perhaps the majors are simply waiting for another committee, another feasibility study, another investment guarantee, another liability waiver, another election, another Government, another excuse?? Or perhaps they know what experienced petroleum engineers have always known: owning oil on paper and producing it profitably are two entirely different propositions or enterprises! In the meantime, the world’s largest oil reserves continue to sit patiently beneath Venezuelan soil, apparently unaware that they’ve already been conquered in Washington!!
Unlike Devious Delcy, who’s busy kissing bambsies, the oil, it seems, hasn’t yet received the liberation memo!
…Emancipation?
One of the remarkable achievements of our ancestors after Emancipation in 1838 was their spontaneous foundation of villages where they could live out what they felt was the meaning of freedom!! It’s important to note that they started out with building their own homes – away from the N****r Yards as Martin Carter reminded us:
“Leaping from the Oppressors’ hate and the scorn of myself; from the agony of the dark hut in the shadow and the hurt of things; from the long days of cruelty and the long nights of pain down to the wide streets of tomorrow, of the next day, leaping, I come; who cannot see will hear.”
Sadly, that great movement soon petered out under the onslaught of the colonial state, who were determined to make freedom an illusion, and they were pushed into the city. Carter continued, “So was I born again stubborn and fierce, screaming in a slum. It was a city and coffin space for home, a river running, prisons, hospitals, men drunk and dying, Judges full of scorn, and priests and parsons fooling Gods with words.”
…new hope?
But at long last we have the opportunity for a real emancipation – once again starting with villages made possible by the Government funding a hundred thousand homes!!
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