VENEZUELA AND OIL. A thread: Ahead of Trump-Big Oil meeting today, my view: There’s too much blanket pessimism about the Venezuelan oil industry. Instead, I belive there are some low-hanging barrels in the map. FREE-TO-READ (next 7 days) link: 🧵1/10

Sure, I’m talking about a *modest* recovery: hundreds of thousands of b/d rather than the millions needed to lift Venezuela’s production back to its 1970s peak. Still, this can be brought on stream over 12 to 18 months — and without eyewatering spending. 🧵2/10

Lots of the pesimistic commentary is focusing on the difficulties of the extra-heavy barrels of the Orinoco Oil Bet. But that overlooks the geological map: there's oil elsewhere in the basins of Maracaibo and Monagas (historic centers of the Veneuzelan oil industry) 🧵3/10

Where the prevailing peismistic commentary is right is that Venezuela has a lot — a lot — of hard-to-get crude in the Orinoco Oil Bet. Naysayers are right too that developing those reserves would take probably as long as a decade and ~$100 billion in investment. 🧵4/10

The Maracaibo basin in the west is home to the Bolivar Coastal Fields, a cluster that includes legendary sites such as Tia Juana. The Monagas basin, in the east, also contains several top oilfields; above all the El Furrial. All are in desperate need of fixing up. 🧵5/10

Will US companies play a big role? It depends who you mean. For big oil-services companies — Halliburton, Baker Hughes, SLB and Weatherford — the answer is yes. Importantily, Chevron, the US 2nd-top oil company, is already there. Its US oil major peers? Unlikely at first. 🧵6/10

How much extra production is realitisc in the short-term? @SecretaryWright has talked about ~700,000 b/d in 12-18 months. That may be a stretch. I’d be more comfortable with predicting a 300,000-500,000 range by mid-2027. Still, that adds to an oversupplied market. 🧵7/10

The commodity market is usually guilty of two sins when analyzing oil-rich nations emerging from crisis: People underestimate their ability to quickly recover some lost production; and massively overestimate the long-term gains. Venezuela may fit into that pattern. 🧵9/10