Venezuela is running out of gas.
Venezuela’s oil production has fallen to levels not seeing since the late-1980s. According to the latest OPEC report, which is based on information provided by the Nicolás Maduro government, the country is producing about 2.3 million barrels of oil per day. In October, it experienced the steepest fall in production of 2017, as only 1.9 million barrels were extracted, 130,000 barrels less than the previous month. The oil industry, however, is still the major source of income as it generates about 96 per cent of the foreign exchange.
Running out of gasoline….. the fondest dream of Red Rachel and Prince Shiny Pixie Dust.
Fire up your biggest ripper comrade, we have lower to go yet!
In typical Maoist fashion … Oil Industry Executives were demoted to Bus Driver … and the Bus Driver was promoted to President of Venezuela. And Venezuelan Oil production is running perfectly. All is well. Nothing to see here … ALL IS WELL !!
Isn’t Socialism beautiful?
Oh yeah … any problems with gasoline supply in the beautiful people’s republic of Venezuela … is because the USA and their CIA … are stealing it. Illegally. In the dark of night.
2.3 million barrels a day is about $55-$60 billion in Venezuelan GDP, currently estimated to be over $300 billion. If the numbers are correct, this could be the year Venezuela reaches full socialism.
Meanwhile, the daughter of Hugo Chavez is the richest person in Venezuela. Boy, she sure is suffering with the downtrodden masses, isn’t she?
But that’s typical of countries with socialist/communist governments. Stalin had his private dacha. Mugabe buried his ill-gotten gains in Swiss bank accounts. The Castros are rolling in wealth while the Cuban people have to make do with next to nothing.
Socialism at its best, isn’t it?
More than 1/2 of that oil exported goes straight to paying for past debt, much of it to China. They made the deal when oil was + $100 / barrel and are paying at less than $60 with their high sulfur oil.
Current foreign reserves are less than $10 billion US … as a result of not having anything else to buy things with.
https://dolartoday.com
An overview of recent idiocies:
https://www.caracaschronicles.com/2018/01/01/gasoline-put-fire/
Uggh … I cannot WAIT to hear Jerry Brown … brag … about how the beautiful Socialist Paradise of Venezuela just raised the Minimum Wage 40% !!! With no mention of the worthlessness of their currency.
Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:
“Venezuela has defaulted on another debt obligation, according to S&P Global Ratings, intensifying investor fears about the country’s ability to make more than $9 billion in bond payments due in 2018.
The ratings firm said Tuesday that Venezuela failed to make $35 million in coupon payments for its bonds due in 2018 within a 30-day grace period. The government and the state-owned oil company are now behind on $1.28 billion in payments, according to investment firm Caracas Capital.
S&P classifies these missed payments as defaults. The firm also said there is a one-in-two chance that Venezuela will default on payments due within the next three months.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/venezuela-misses-another-debt-payment-raising-stakes-for-bondholders-1514933217?mod=e2tw
Included is a bit of visual graphic showing which months in 2018 look like there won’t be so much imported food in the refrigerator… Part of the Venezuelan nomenclature for this includes the phrase, “my refrigerator is nervous” … (my refrigerator thinks I’m going to sell it as I don’t use it for much food).
April, August, and October 2018 are looking particularly shitty.
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With no mention of the worthlessness of their currency.
On the other hand, is there anything in the stores for people to buy with their worthless currency?
Yep … their food stamps aren’t worth the ink they’re printed with …
The paper can be boiled and made into a cellulose stew
With the people now to poor to even import enough beans, the production of methane will be dropping, too. There goes that option.
Since we are talking about the “production” (actually extraction) of oil, allow me this aside.
The world consumes 96 million (48 gallon) barrels of oil daily. That comes to 1.5 trillion gallons of oil a year.
That’s just a staggering amount. No wonder “environmentalists” always predicted peak oil, that is oil will run out, in a decade. And until recently actually they did, at least the known reserves. But in the mean time more and more oil is discovered. Now we have so much oil the known reserves will last the century, so they have to invent something else for people to stop using oil, like “global warming”.
And they have acknowledged there couldn’t possibly have been anywhere near that number of dinosaurs to sacrifice their bodies for later human consumption. But they still call it “fossil” fuel. They should calculate just how much vegetation would have to be turned into oil.
I believe oil is produced by the earth, and seeps to the crust. You just have to find it. And at each site, as long as you don’t extract the oil faster than the seepage, you can have oil forever. This has been shown by wells, thought to be depleted, producing again after being abandoned for decades. And we are finding oil (and natural gas) all over the place.
You are also missing that even if we “ran out” of oil, at a certain price point, syn-gas made from coal becomes profitable, and the US has about 330 years worth of known coal reserves.
I happen to agree, and have read very interesting Russian studies that support your assertion.
Dinosaurs indeed.
to the textbook grade school explanation where oil comes from, dinosaurs, I pose the question regarding why oh why is there methane in the atmosphere of, wait for it, Neptune where summer temps hover at, oh, I dunno, about -300. F or C at that point does it matter?
are future astronauts going to find dinosaur fossils on Neptune? they would have to be a marine species or sumptin’ . . . . . . .
yes, hydrocarbons come from decomposition of organic matter. in MINISCULE QUANTITIES. the ginormous amounts of oil *already* pumped plus ALL known reserves plus ALL unknown reserves . . . . what utter fiction they continue to shove into the most pliable brains in society.
I have had this belief for some 20+ years now.
oh, oh, on the topic of venezuela, the esteeemed naomi klein’s rep FINALLY responded to my THIRD enquiry in as many months on klein’s silence. she is hibernating on the book circuit promoting another tome of some sort. blaming Trump for something-or-other, cant recall. curiously it STILL doesnt explain the silence . . . .
With the people now to poor to even import enough beans, the production of methane will be dropping, too. There goes that option.
Ah, but that’s cause for rejoicing, isn’t it? Look at how much smaller Venezuela’s carbon footprint is. That’ll made Red Rachel and Prince Pretty Hair envious.
Look up Dr. Thomas Gold and his ideas on oil production. He thought along similar lines.
As someone who presumably studies history your post on oil is incredibly misinformed. Oil does not come from dinosaurs and the oil we extract, refine and consume does not come from deep in the Earth, or from Neptune. Oil was formed by tiny bacteria (you’ll love the cute children dinosaur images in the link below):
https://www.thoughtco.com/does-oil-come-from-dinosaurs-1092003
Some thoughts in point form:
1. Oil claimed to be abiogenic (from inside the Earth) is only found in conventional oil fields. While there have been many tricks to prove oil is abiogenic you cannot find this oil without conventional oil present.
2. There are no proven reserves of abiogenic oil in rock units that do not have fossilized bacteria or that are adjacent to or intersect rock units having fossilized bacteria.
3. There are many young rock units that have high porosity with overlying capping units – ideal for trapping oil – but with no ancient fossilized bacteria and with no oil. If oil comes from inside the Earth then some of these units should contain Earth oil.
4. Methane exists inside the Earth. This is well known. When miners extract minerals deep in the Earth (4 km underground) they often intersect pockets of methane. There are bacteria known to feed on sulphide minerals. When these bacteria die they decay to methane.
5. Some oil fields appear to recharge after the conventional oil has been extracted. This has led some to propose abiogenic oil is feeding the reservoirs from below. This has several problems. First, why can’t conventional oil, previously trapped, be responsible for the recharge. This is known to happen. Second, why is it that just the conventional oil reservoirs that are recharged by deeper Earth oil?
6. If you travel to a former garbage dump you will find methane. This is produced naturally from the breakdown of organic material. It is the same process that leads to oil formation. It is possible that natural methane exists on the Earth and on other planets. We do not know how this methane formed. Organic methane is far more common on Earth. Why is it hard to believe that bacteria can’t produce oil deposits? Do you deny coal deposits as well or is coal produced by natural Earth coal?
Historybuff, you have been wrong for 20+ years.
The most useful thing the environmentalists may have done is to “Save the Whales”. If we do run out of conventional fossil-fuel oil, we can go back to using whale oil.
?
uh, you really need to parse my previous posting. where in blazes did I even hint that those trillions of barrels came from dinosaurs? you state clearly that oil does not come from dinosaurs and then proceed to describe the well known process of biological decomposition via bacteria. what is it you are claiming the bacteria ‘fed on’ too produce the oil?
which is it, rotted dinosaurs or not?
the FACT that there are very significant amounts of methane on Neptune shows that hydrocarbons can easily be from a GEOLOGICAL process or perhaps you will now claim that’s from bacteria on that planet. which then requires a period where the planet was warm enough for any sort of useful biological-chemical reactions to take place. you leave too much out of your post to make sense. and this: “or is coal produced by natural Earth coal?”. I cant decipher at all what you are asking here. ‘natural earth coal’ wtf is that? as opposed to what? from asteroids? magic?
questions questions questions.
but you could be right.
p.s. the other big primary school fiction is the thing about the 10 billion yr old dust cloud.
I think the solar system came out of an early tightly packed group of stars that all went supernova at the same time and the sun actually came *after* by scooping up the residual gas cloud and igniting in the usual way. for me that explains a whooooole lot about the earth’s profile incl the iron core akin to the iron forming in the heart of older stars via fusion and then stalling. ie all that molten rock has been that way since the very beginning. I just do not and have not for even longer than 20+ yrs bought into that explanation. ‘heat from radioactive decay’ bla bla bla. sure, go ahead there grade school teacher, melt a whole friggin planet with the whatever million year half life of uranium, in rock which is a really good conductor of heat and thus it doesnt accumulate enough to melt. or substitute a much faster and hotter radioactive decay that did melt the whole thing long ago but, but, oopsie, lots of time to solidify again so that story is out.
it also explains the different proportion of elements in the rocky planets, if they came out of a dust cloud mixing for 10,000,000,000 years, the total of each element on each planet should be very similar, just not the composite minerals of course.
etc etc
but I could be worng agin!
anyways, happy new year y’all !!!
Is Dr. Thomas Gold the guy that drilled thousands of feet into granite and found oil, when all the scientists of the world know that granite was formed on earth far before the dinosaurs existed.
… yes B. A. thanks for knowing this Drs. full name, I’d forgotten it.
Gold is known to have found 90 barrels of oil.
Who finds the oil, the biologist or the geologist?
thanks for knowing this Drs. full name, I’d forgotten it.
Gold indeed oversaw some attempts to drill into rocks in northern Scandinavia nearly 40 years ago. The results were inconclusive but some traces of oil were noted.
I first became aware of his ideas when he published an article or two in Scientific American shortly before the drilling project began.
Steve from Rockwood: if I recall correctly, Gold was actually an astronomer. His ideas were often out in left field, with many of his colleagues regarding him as a scientific gadfly.
Thomas Gold (astrophysicist) theorized that hydrocarbons are present across the universe, and there is no reason to believe oil & gas deposits are biological in origin. Gold believed that hydrocarbons were trapped deep inside the Earth and that they migrate to the surface slowly over time. As hydrocarbons reach the shallow crust they attract colonies of microbes that feed upon them. Gold believed that the entire Earth is covered in microbes that extend deep into the Earth to depths limited only by temperature.
Gold theorized that large fault systems which extend into the Upper Mantle would allow deep Earth hydrocarbons to migrate into the shallow crust to collect as oil & gas deposits. He pointed to a large number of oil fields that have many earth quakes. The quakes signal faults, and the faults are the conduits for the oil and gas migration into porous traps.
In 1986 Gold tested his theory by drilling deep into a meteor impact crater at Lake Siljan. His drillhole reached a depth of 6.8 km, taking over 5 years to complete, and recovered 90 barrels of “oil”. Gold’s proposed that a meteor impact would crack the crust right down to the mantle, allowing the Earth hydrocarbons a pathway to surface. This idea has since been refuted. Even the largest impact craters are now thought to have penetrated not more than a few kilometers into the crust which is 40 km thick.
In 1992 Gold wrote in “The Deep Hot Biosphere” that microbial life is widespread across the porous Earth to depths of several kilometers and that such life could exist on other planets. The presence of bacteria in oil is due to their affinity for hydrocarbons (the Gold model) and is not proof that oil originates from the bacteria (the current model).
Gold’s famous quote was that “hydrocarbons are not biology reworked by geology but rather geology reworked by biology”.
Despite Gold’s claim of deep Earth hydrocarbons, no such deposits have ever been found using his model. The people who discover oil are geologists and not biologists (i.e. hydrocarbons are not geology reworked by biology, otherwise we would be using biologic markers to find oil such as mapping the location of microbial colonies).
Recently, in the deep mines of South Africa, scientists discovered abundant bacteria that live off sulphide minerals at depths of 4 km. These bacteria have not been found at surface suggesting they exist only at depth. It may be that Gold’s microbial colonies deep into the Earth’s crust is not to be written off after all, even if his ideas on the origin of fossil fuels are wrong.
Perhaps there is no better evidence for deep hydrocarbons than in the volatile gases from volcanos, such as those in the Hawaii volcanic islands where the magma is thought to come directly from the Upper Mantle. Scientists routinely test the gases from these volcanic vents. The most common gasses are H20 (water vapour), CO2 (carbon dioxide), and SO2 (sulfur dioxide). CH4 (methane) is also present in very minor concentrations. So, yes, hydrocarbons are present in the Upper Mantle – in very small concentrations.
The supporters of Gold’s theory never seem to question the fact that coal – incredibly abundant on a scale similar to oil – is formed by decaying and compressed organic matter. Almost 1/3 of the world’s energy commons from coal.
Gold had a brilliant mind. He was known for his intuition. In 1940 he wrote that the ear hears based on a feedback system. He was widely ignored until his theory was proved in the 1970s.
In 1948 Gold co-authored a paper on the Steady State Theory of the Universe (the universe is constant and did not derive from the Big Bang). By the 1960s this theory was widely disproved.
In 1959 Gold coined the term “magnetosphere” while trying to explain how the sun ejects material in the form of solar flares and how this material reacts with charged particles surrounding the Earth – ground-breaking thinking.
In 1968 Gold argued (after the discovery of a rapidly rotating pulsar) that pulsars emit radiation similar to a rotating beacon. He was widely panned by the scientific community but later proven right after discoveries of other pulsars using radio telescopes.
Gold had worked with and was funded in part by NASA from the 1950s and coined the term “moon dust” to describe what he thought the astronauts would land on – a powdery layer of fine rock. Apollo 11 proved him right but he was not directly credited.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s Gold was critical of NASA’s claims that the space shuttle program could fly 50 missions per year. He was warned not to criticize NASA or he would lose his funding. His criticism continued and the funding did not. NASA never reached the 50 missions per year.
Freeman Dyson wrote about Gold “his theories are always original, always important, usually controversial – and usually right”.
Usually right, but not always. “Tommy” Gold died in 2004 at the age of 84.
I borrowed heavily from Wikipedia.