Venezuela has superior natural conditions and abundant energy resources, with proven reserves of 300 billion barrels of oil (including heavy oil), ranking first in the world. Saudi Arabia, as we know it, is the world's largest oil producer, but it doesn't have as much reserves as Venezuela, and the country seems to be built on a giant oil depot.
Yet Venezuela doesn't seem to be rich, so what's going on?
Venezuela is located in the northern part of South America, with an area of about 916,400 square kilometers (and claims about 159,000 square kilometers of Ethiopian territory under the jurisdiction of Guyana), ranking fourth among the provincial administrative regions of the mainland. Venezuela's land neighbors are, in clockwise order: Guyana, Brazil, Colombia.
Venezuela has a population of about 28.3 million (2022), of which 58% are of mixed Indo-European descent, 29% are white, 11% are black, and 2% are Indians. The official language of Venezuela is Spanish, and the majority of its inhabitants are Catholic, a branch of Christianity.
In the northwest of Venezuela, there is a Gulf of Venezuela, which belongs to the Caribbean Sea. The Gulf of Venezuela is about 120 kilometers long from north to south and about 240 kilometers wide from east to west.
To the south of the Gulf of Venezuela, there is Lake Maracaibo, connected by a strait of about 54 kilometers.
During the colonial period, when the Italian colonists came to Lake Maracaibo and saw the villages inhabited by the Indians, there were stilt houses on the water everywhere, and they immediately thought of Venice. The Italians named the land Venezuela, which is now Venezuela, after Veneezia (the Italian name for Venice).
Lake Maracaibo is located in the northwest of Venezuela and is fed by several rivers in the Andes. Lake Maracaibo is about 108 kilometers wide from east to west, 159 kilometers long from north to south, and covers an area of about 13,200 square kilometers, which is larger than the sum of China's four major freshwater lakes and is the largest lake in South America.
The estuary (strait) of Lake Maracaibo is narrow, about 55 kilometers long, and only 5.5 kilometers at its narrowest point. As a result of this particular geographical condition, the backflow of seawater from the Gulf of Venezuela into Lake Maracaibo is greatly reduced. Because the sea water is denser than the lake's water, the water that enters the lake also sinks to the bottom, so Lake Maracaibo is often considered a freshwater lake.
The Gulf of Venezuela and Lake Maracaibo are oil-rich areas. Lake Maracaibo is shallower than the waters of the Gulf of Venezuela in terms of difficulty in extraction, making Lake Maracaibo and its surroundings one of Venezuela's hottest oil-producing regions.
In 1917, Royal Dutch Shell came to Lake Maracaibo and drilled its first oil production well. In 1922, large-scale oil extraction began on Lake Maracaibo.
Venezuela's economy, which is largely oil-dependent, is often derided as a "single-cell state".
In 2008, the international crude oil futures reached 147 US dollars / barrel, in those years Venezuela was rich and the people were rich, BMW carved cars were full of fragrant roads, abundant food and clothing, and thousands of trees bloomed at night in the east wind. But Venezuela did not take advantage of that golden time to develop education and agriculture.
Later, when the price of oil fell, Venezuela did not have such a good time, and the main reason is that its extraction and refining costs are several times that of Saudi Arabia.
Venezuela's oil extraction costs are high, the quality is poor, there are many impurities, it needs to be refined, and the transportation distance is long, so it is more than self-sufficient, but the competitiveness of exports is insufficient.
At present, many Persian Gulf oil fields such as Saudi Arabia are still artesian wells, and they are directly injected with an eye, and Venezuela's oil is obviously not like this, and its extraction cost is more than twice that of Saudi Arabia, and the cost is higher than that of Russia.
Venezuela is a heavy oil, which needs to be processed twice, and the refining cost is high; Saudi Arabia is a light oil, which can be used directly and has a low refining cost.
In the past, the United States was an oil importer, and Venezuela could export oil to the United States nearby, but now the United States is an oil exporter, and the two countries have become competitive, and Venezuela's oil can only cross the Pacific or Atlantic to Asia and Europe. To go to Asia, you either take the Panama Canal and pay huge tolls; Either take a detour to Tierra del Fuego, which is several times as far away as the Persian Gulf from East Asia. Europe can transport oil from Saudi Arabia's Red Sea coast and buy it from Russia through pipelines from Ukraine, which is also much closer than across the Atlantic.
In the past, the United States was an importer, and Venezuela's economy was very good, but since the breakthrough of shale oil technology in the United States and the emergence of an oil exporter, Venezuela has become a thorn in the side of the United States.
Venezuela pursues an anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, and anti-hegemonist national policy in its diplomacy, and it seems that the United States is the target of the United States, and the United States has also imposed various sanctions on Venezuela, making it difficult for Venezuela to develop.
Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, is located in a valley in the Coast Mountains, just 12 kilometers from the Caribbean Sea, but it is not a coastal city, and its northern peaks reach a maximum altitude of more than 2,000 meters.