Reading today’s NY Times, it looks as if Venezuela is set to displace Saudi Arabia, as an oil producer. A new discovery (the “Orinoco Belt”) may turn out to have vast reserves of oil. This is making Hugo Chavez very happy-he looks forward to humbling the USA. Anyway: 20 years ago, geologists described Venezuela as “all played out”-I remember dire predictions of economic colapse, as the oil reserves would run out around 2010. Now, it seems, this was all wrong!
How did the big oil company geologists miss this one? Is there any chance that the continental USA might harbor a previously unknown field like the Orinoco Belt?
The dirty little secret about Venezuelan oil is that it is of a type that is particularly hard to refine. Special processes need to be brought to bear on it, and those tend to be only used in the Gulf Coast refineries of the United States.
Therefore, without the Americans as a customer, Venezuelan crude isn’t worth much.
Apparently, Enya knew about it long ago… who knew? 
I don’t think they ‘missed’ the Orinoco belt, it just hasn’t been economic to exploit it until today’s prices and technology arrived. Canada has similarly monstrous reserves of ‘oil’ if you count a mixture of sand and bitumen as being oil.
For example, Saudi oil costs a couple of dollars a barrel to pump, whereas making tar sand into oil costs about 20-30 bucks a barrel, so it’s a disingenous to call it oil.
In the same sense there are trillions of barrels of oil locked in the shale of the Rockie Mountains. Getting it out is another story.
I’m waiting for the relevation that Saddam hid his WMD’s in Venezuela and now it is the next member in the Axis of Evil.
While I agree with your facts, I question your conclusions. The Alberta tar sands are being readied for large-scale production now. It is just a matter of waiting until more traditional sources of oil become expensive enough that tar sands oil becomes viable economically. It will happen one day and things will be in place to let the end product fill your car as well as Saudi oil.
That is the thing that throws me off when people talk about peak oil and skyrocketing prices. We still have stupid amounts of oil left in the untapped sources and can’t ever truly run out. The price is also limited by the massive quanity that will be introduced into the market. The main additional costs are the increased extraction and refining costs which aren’t that terrible compared to some of the high price points that have already occured in recent years. I am pretty sure that it is oild just like Saudi oil only a little dirtier.
They didn’t. According to Bitor PdVSA (whose offices in Caracas I’ve spent some time at…) the Orinoco bitumen and hydrocarbon deposits were well-known since the 1920’s or 1930’s, when British engineers discovered it while looking for light crude oil. The problem is that the bitumen is extremely thick, and for several years was primarily used to make the ill-fated product “Orimulsion.” Last year (or two?), I spoke with personnel in Venezuela about a scheme to set up massive refineries to turn the bitumen into crude oil to take advantage of a better market and tax structure.