OIL BE DAMNED?

Controlling the world's oil supply, which we have effectively is not a bad thing. The political, economic and military leverage with China and other nations is beyond measure.

In reality are we going to extract all this oil at once? Go nut rebuilding infrastructure? No. Voldemort will roll this out as he twists the knife and negotiates with the various stake holders.

To argue we should have looked the other way and allowed Maduro to stay in power is a joke.

OIL BE DAMNED?

Quartz Media

Jan 13, 2025

President Donald Trump has found his favorite kind of policy tool: a round number with swagger. In Venezuela, the president is said to be aiming for $50 a barrel as the anchor of an open-ended U.S. intervention that has already moved past rhetoric and into control, with Washington assuming authority over Venezuelan oil sales and engineering a handover of a month’s worth of supplies, all while promising that U.S. oil companies will help rebuild the country’s battered economy. It’s a strategy built around price discipline, political theater, and a notable lack of discussion about when — or how — any of this ends.

Oil executives, meanwhile, are doing the math and quietly reaching for antacids. The U.S. is pumping at record levels even as the sector sheds jobs, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. Trump’s $50 dream runs straight into what Carolyn Kissane, an energy professor at New York University, calls the industry’s basic constraint: “Trump has an old energy narrative that if we have $50 a barrel oil, we’re going to have much lower gasoline prices” — but “they're not going to pump if they're losing money.” Break-evens for drillers sit around $62 to $64 a barrel, per the Energy Information Administration, which makes $50 less of a target and more of a stress test.

So far, the market has responded with something like a shrug. Venezuelan oil is about 1% of global supply, and even after the U.S. raid that removed Nicolás Maduro from power, trading hasn’t turned chaotic. Still, executives are bracing for a slide. Analysts expect prices to drift toward $50 this summer, and a late-December Dallas Fed survey captured the mood (“Decreasing oil prices are making many of our firm’s wells noneconomic,” one anonymous executive said). Trump, leaning into the power-theater of it all, met Friday with oil company CEOs, then announced the group pledged “at least” $100 billion in Venezuela, a big number aimed at a small slice of the oil market — for a country where the only thing truly guaranteed is that the risk premium never truly clocks out. Quartz’s Joseph Zeballos-Roig has more on cheap-oil politics colliding with expensive-oil balance sheets.