A PDVSA uniform hangs at a market in Puerto Cruz, Venezuela.
Photographer: Wil Riera/Bloomberg
By choking off the Maduro regime's finances, the Trump administration hopes to convince Venezuela's military brass to abandon the autocratic leader and accelerate his exit. But the tack comes with great risk: The oil industry is essentially Venezuela's lone source of hard currency, and the sanctions could wind up exacerbating the humanitarian crisis in the country.
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PDVSA employees are also working furiously to entice vendors to sell them refined products such as naphtha that are critical to keeping its ailing industry working. As the supply of those products falls under the sanctions, early signs of a gasoline shortage have surfaced in the countryside.
An exodus of PDVSA employees in key areas such as commerce and supply has only added to the confusion, according to the people. PDVSA has even reached out to ex-employees to ask them for traders' phone numbers. The lack of experienced employees has complicated what would be in normal circumstances a fairly straightforward job making deals with traders to buy shipments of oil that equal less than half of one percent of the global market. (The U.S. typically purchased 400,000 barrels a day from Venezuela.) At the same time, the sanctions have narrowed options for making and receiving payments.
#Venezuela oil exports have sliced to a 10-month low. Last year, Venezuela loaded one vessel a day for U.S. refiners. After the U.S. ratcheted up sanctions on Jan. 28, only one vessel has loaded over a 10-day period. That has turned oil tankers into floating storage facilities.
There are about 8.28 million barrels of Venezuelan crude idling all over the Gulf of Mexico in an area that stretches from U.S. coast to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, according to cargo-tracking and market intelligence company Kpler.
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But with the U.S. supply cut off, the country may be getting close to running out of gasoline. In some of PDVSA's fuel stock facilities, inventories have been drained down to as little as just one day, according to a company document dated Feb. 6 that was seen by Bloomberg News.
Read the article online here:No Sleep, Frantic Calls: Maduro's Oil Team Scrambles to Survive U.S. Ban
An oil storage tank stands at the PDVSA El Tigre facility in Venezuela.
Photographer: Bloomberg
At Venezuela's state oil company, desperation and chaos are setting in one week after the U.S. imposed a de facto ban on the country's crude products.
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