PDVSA in talks with US for sale of its oil

Raphael John-Lall

Free­lance Con­trib­u­tor

In a strate­gic move to en­sure en­er­gy sta­bil­i­ty, Venezuela oil com­pa­ny Petróleos de Venezuela, SA (PDVSA), yes­ter­day con­firmed it is ad­vanc­ing ne­go­ti­a­tions with the Unit­ed States for the sale of its oil.

The state-owned com­pa­ny spec­i­fied, how­ev­er, that these talks are gov­erned by the ex­ist­ing trade agree­ments be­tween the two na­tions.

In a state­ment post­ed on In­sta­gram, it re­vealed that the process “is be­ing car­ried out un­der sim­i­lar schemes to those in place with in­ter­na­tion­al com­pa­nies, such as Chevron, and is based on a strict­ly com­mer­cial trans­ac­tion, with cri­te­ria of le­gal­i­ty, trans­paren­cy and ben­e­fit for both par­ties.”

“PDVSA reaf­firms its com­mit­ment to con­tin­ue build­ing al­liances that pro­mote na­tion­al de­vel­op­ment for the ben­e­fit of the Venezue­lan peo­ple and con­tribute to glob­al en­er­gy sta­bil­i­ty,” the oil com­pa­ny stat­ed.

PDVSA’s state­ment comes af­ter US Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s an­nounce­ment on Tues­day night that Venezuela “will be turn­ing over” up to 50 mil­lion bar­rels of oil to the US.

In a so­cial me­dia post, Trump said the oil, worth about $2.8 bil­lion, will be sold at its mar­ket price, adding he would con­trol the mon­ey raised and use it to ben­e­fit the peo­ple of Venezuela and the US.

His com­ments came af­ter he said the US oil in­dus­try would be “up and run­ning” in Venezuela with­in 18 months and that he ex­pect­ed huge in­vest­ments to pour in­to the coun­try.

This comes in the wake of the ouster of Nico­las Maduro af­ter a mil­i­tary op­er­a­tion in Cara­cas on Sat­ur­day. For­mer vice pres­i­dent Del­cy Ro­driguez has since been sworn in as act­ing Pres­i­dent.

Mean­while, the US Coast Guard yes­ter­day seized two Venezuela-linked oil tankers in the At­lantic and the Caribbean.

A Russ­ian-flagged tanker, known as the Bel­la 1 and now called the Marinera, was seized in the North At­lantic, near Ice­land, for a vi­o­la­tion of US sanc­tions, the US Eu­ro­pean Com­mand said.

Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Sec­re­tary Kristi Noem said the US had al­so seized a sec­ond ves­sel in the Caribbean, the M/T Sophia.

Maduro, in an in­ter­view on Jan­u­ary 1 with Span­ish aca­d­e­m­ic and jour­nal­ist Igna­cio Ra­mon­et, had em­pha­sised that if the US wants oil from Venezuela, the Bo­li­var­i­an na­tion will be ready for US in­vest­ments, as with Chevron.

“The Unit­ed States should know that if they want com­pre­hen­sive eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment agree­ments, Venezuela is al­so here, as I’ve said time and time again: if there were ever any ra­tio­nal­i­ty and diplo­ma­cy (on the part of the US), we could per­fect­ly well talk. We have the ma­tu­ri­ty and the stature, and we are al­so peo­ple of our word,” Maduro said.

Chi­na al­so has oil and gas agree­ments with Venezuela and strong­ly con­demned the US ac­tions yes­ter­day.

Chi­na de­nounced what it called “in­tim­i­da­tion” by the Unit­ed States, which al­leged­ly de­mand­ed that Venezuela sev­er its eco­nom­ic ties with Bei­jing as a con­di­tion for ex­ploit­ing and trad­ing its oil, and de­fend­ed the South Amer­i­can coun­try as a sov­er­eign state with full con­trol over its nat­ur­al re­sources.

Chi­nese For­eign Min­istry spokes­woman Mao Ning stat­ed at a press con­fer­ence that Venezuela “is a sov­er­eign coun­try and en­joys full and per­ma­nent sov­er­eign­ty over its nat­ur­al re­sources,” in re­sponse to a ques­tion re­gard­ing re­ports from the US net­work ABC News.