The U.S. Wants the Oil From These 17 Venezuelan Fields

The Trump administration’s new partner in Venezuela stands to vastly expand its reach in the country’s most important oil basins as part of an unorthodox deal announced last week.Yet meaningfully increasing production from those areas will be expensive and time consuming for North American Blue Energy Partners, Venezuela’s second-largest private oil producer and the U.S.government’s partner.Roughly half of the 17 production areas covered under the deal are in Lake Maracaibo, according to a project list obtained and independently corroborated by The New York Times.

The lake is a longstanding oil-producing area in the northwestern corner of the country that has fallen into disrepair.The other half are sprinkled throughout an oil-rich cradle called the Orinoco Belt, much of it a savanna that stretches across central and northeastern Venezuela.Most of the country’s oil reserves are buried there, but that crude is the consistency of asphalt.

Transforming it into a liquid that can be piped is expensive.Many of the areas in the Orinoco made available to North American Blue Energy under the deal are also largely undeveloped, so in addition to drilling new wells, the company most likely would have to invest in infrastructure like pipelines and processing facilities....