Trump, China and 300 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil
As the US powers ahead with its plans to recover Latin America’s ‘oil El Dorado’, we explore Venezuela’s environmental and geopolitical outlook
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The conflict over Crimea may prove a last gas…p for Russian energy warfare
On clean energy, the smart money at Davos is betting against the most powerful person here.
In this episode, we discuss the geo-politicisation of natural gas and the challenge that it presents to traders and investors alike with Anne-Sophie Corbeau, Global Research Scholar at the Center for Global Energy Policy.
Algeria’s LNG exports to the EU fell around 13% to 6.3m tonnes (8.5bcm) last year, down from roughly 7.3m tonnes in 2024, according to Kpler data. This was “primarily because a gas processing unit” at Sonatrach’s 7.7m tonnes/year “Skikda complex was taken offline for extended scheduled maintenance and modernisation”, said Neetika Gupta, vice president of upstream research at consultancy Rystad Energy. However, the drop in LNG exports also reflected the country’s strategy to prioritise pipeline flows to Spain and Italy combined with higher domestic demand, forecast to grow 3-4% per year in the coming years, said Nacho Garcia-Lajara, senior research analyst at Wood Mackenzie. Stable flowsFlows to the Iberian peninsula via the Medgaz pipeline remained
Venezuela holds 70% of Latin America's natural gas reserves, which it could export to Colombia and Trinidad to increase revenues.
The US intervention in Venezuela may jeopardize both the flow of discounted Venezuelan oil to China's teapot refineries and the role of Chinese oil companies in Venezuela’s upstream business.
In discussing the dramatic seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, over the weekend, President Donald Trump declared that the United States would now “take back” the country’s oil. Yet he has offered little clarity on what exactly this means.