Interview with José Toro Hardy: "The financial situation of Pdvsa is not viable"



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And in this system of joint ventures that has been imposed in Venezuela since 2007 can be considered a failure?

It was an absolute failure, because in this scheme of joint ventures PDVSA owns 70% of the shares in each of the projects, but that implies that you have to make 60% of the investments. If PDVSA has not made these investments, private companies either. The result is that production has been produced vertiginously.

Toro Hardy, former director of PDVSA in the 1980s, explained that a project that did not work was to increase production in the Orinoco belt, "where there are huge amounts of extra-heavy crude and where a lot of investment is needed to produce and serve the customers of Venezuela Currently, the extrapesados ​​(gross) are not extracted, but they are mixed with light importers, coming from the United States, in order to obtain production and to comply with China, a nation that pays its debt with oil.

How does the Conoco Phillips trial currently affect PDVSA's domestic and international activities?

– Following the arbitration that PDVSA loses with Conoco Phillips, the court orders Venezuela to pay $ 2,040 million to this American company. And as there is no payment to date, legal proceedings are under way to seize property, including those located in the Caribbean islands, such as Aruba and Bonaire, where some 300,000 barrels of oil are stored per day. There is a serious problem with the storage of Venezuelan oil that must be placed on the markets. There is a risk of attachment due to lack of payments and agreements with applicants.

What happens if there is no real-time distribution of Venezuelan oil?

– At present, there are about 70 tankers anchored in Venezuelan waters that can not move in warehouses or international ports. Of course, this has broken down and created a chaos of gross national storage. Currently, the warehouses in the east of the country are already full and oil production is sent via cabotage (transfer along the coast) to the deposits of the West, which also take over, since oil production then has to begin to decline even more than it has declined. There is nowhere to put as much oil.

What are the consequences of this storage?

– There is no more distributive flow and, therefore, three of the raw transformers located in the state of Anzoátegui have been closed. In a very short time, PDVSA should already inform its customers that it is not able to comply with the oil supply contracts and, probably, for reasons of force majeure (.. .) we can not stand. Already at this time the storage capacity of the East of the country has been copied and the storage capacity in the west of the country is already recovered.

The market analyst lamented the current situation, produces embargo threats to the company. state. "PDVSA had huge storage capacity, with gigantic deposits that we had on the island of Bonaire and Curacao was part of the external ones."

And how is the situation going? How can we get that stored oil out?

– Pay international companies what they owe. To reach agreements. I suggest that the government put in place negotiating tables with its major creditors. This can support the increase in oil production in Venezuela. It is urgent to revise and adjust the Organic Law of Hydrocarbons; in 2007, the decline of PDVSA accelerated. If the government wants to increase production, it has to negotiate.

– But the government says it can look for non-US partners to recover production, like China and Russia …

– Figures such as those calculated by Professor Francisco Monaldi indicate that it would be necessary to invest a 20 000 million dollars a year for the next 10 to increase production, at least more than 3 million barrels. The Venezuelan state has not the slightest opportunity to do so, even with its current partners. If we want to recover the oil headquarters of Venezuela, we will have to recover the private investment with a more daring oil opening than the previous one.

"The Chinese partners could participate on an equal footing with other investments.The Chinese are the first to ask for legal certainty.They want to do good business in Venezuela, but they want good Legal certainty: They do not want contracts to be fingered and then lose.The same thing happens with the Russians, which seem to show more interest for the development of gas than for the development of the oil sector.

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