Venezuela Is Tearing Apart Oil Pipelines to Sell as Scrap Metal
- PDVSA offers to pay contractors with scrap metal, spare parts
- Venezuela needs light crude from Monagas field for gasoline
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Venezuela’s capacity to produce some much-needed gasoline and diesel of its own hinges on a single oil play. To tap it, the Nicolas Maduro regime is willing to cannibalize the country’s crumbling energy infrastructure to pay contractors with scrap metal.
Unlike the tar-like crude from Venezuela’s Orinoco region, the light oil from Monagas state is the only kind that’s easy to process into fuel at the country’s aging refineries. It’s also the only area where production doesn’t require the help of sanction-wary partners.