ConocoPhillips deploys team to assess Venezuela oil prospects
(Bloomberg) – ConocoPhillips has dispatched a team to Venezuela to evaluate the prospects for a return to drilling in the oil-rich Caribbean nation almost two decades after billions of dollars in assets were seized by the socialist regime.
The undertaking makes ConocoPhillips just the second major U.S. oil company to publicly disclosed an on-the-ground inspection in Venezuela, home to some of the world’s biggest crude reserves.
The purpose of the trip is to “better understand the potential for in-country oil and gas opportunities,” Dennis Nuss, a spokesman, said in a statement on Thursday. “We will evaluate Venezuela against other international opportunities as part of our disciplined investment framework.”
Despite President Donald Trump’s call earlier this year for U.S. drillers to help revive the Venezuelan oil sector, ConocoPhillips Chief Executive Officer Ryan Lance has been telling investors his main priority is recouping roughly $12 billion it’s owed after its holdings in the South American nation were nationalized in 2007.
Exxon Mobil Corp., which also quit the country after asset seizures by the late dictator Hugo Chavez, said two weeks ago that it sent a team to assess Venezuelan opportunities.
Rebuilding Venezuelan oil output to 3 MMbpd would require “probably hundreds of millions of dollars” over a long-time horizon, Dan Ammann, upstream president at Exxon, said during the CERAWeek by S&P Global conference in Houston last month.
A lot has to happen to pave the way for more foreign investment, Lance has said on several occasions.
“We’re trying to be constructive and help the administration think through what’s needed to incentivize the investments that will go into Venezuela,” Lance said during the CERAWeek event. “We have to see what’s the pathway to starting to recover some of what’s owed us.”
