The answer to this question is seemingly obvious, but ….
Trump Considers Extending Chevron License to Pump Oil in Venezuela
The Wall Street Journal reports Trump Considers Extending Chevron License to Pump Oil in Venezuela
President Trump, during a Wednesday meeting at the White House with Chevron CEO Mike Wirth and other oil industry executives, expressed openness to reversing the administration’s recent decision to order the company to wind down its Venezuela operation next month, the people said.
The president’s team—as part of any move to extend Chevron’s license—is weighing a plan to impose tariffs or other financial penalties on countries that buy oil from Venezuela. The details of the plan are still being worked out, the people said.
The Trump administration has been eager to reach a deal with Maduro to accept the return of migrants residing in the U.S., part of a deportation effort that is a priority for the president. But any dealing with Venezuela could reopen a political debate, particularly among Florida Republicans who advocate for maximum pressure on Maduro.
Rubio, who has been a vocal opponent of Maduro for years, told Wirth during a Monday phone call that he thought the company should pull out by the Trump administration’s April 3 deadline, the people said. The State Department confirmed the call with Wirth, but declined to comment further.
Chevron accounts for around a quarter of Venezuela’s total oil production and about a third of its oil exports, with part of the revenue earmarked to pay down billions of dollars in debt that the company is owed by Venezuela. The Venezuelan oil is refined in the U.S. into asphalt and other products. Chevron has previously argued its withdrawal from Venezuela would destabilize the local economy, encouraging further migration.
The “Beauty” of the Plan
If we let Venezuela supply US oil needs, but nobody else, then we can reduce our trade deficit with Canada.
Of course, our trade deficit would rise with Venezuela.
And we would have to ship the oil here instead of using pipelines already in place in Canada.
Q: Since a total halt of Canadian oil would eliminate the US trade deficit with Canada, could we eliminate tariffs on Canada?
A: Don’t be silly. To do that Canada needs to become the 51st state.
Yes, this is how stupid things now are.
When Does Tariff Greatness Start?
I addressed that question yesterday in Trump’s Tax Hike ‘Liberation Day’ Day Begins April 2. Expect to Suffer
On Liberation Day, the price of lumber, steel, avocados, toys, literally everything is likely to increase.
Best of all, it’s country specific.
The Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the U.S., which details individual rates on particular commodities, has about 13,000 line items. The U.S. trades with roughly 200 countries. For those doing the math, that’s a 2,600,000 matrix.
How can that possibly not be great?
For discussion, please see A Clear Explanation of How Reciprocal Tariffs Will Work
Q: What do we call this?
A: Winning, silly. Anything and everything done by Trump is winning by definition.
How Much Will Lumber Tariffs Increase the Price of a Home?
In case you missed it, please consider How Much Will Lumber Tariffs Increase the Price of a Home?
Lumber tariffs are already close to 15 percent. Trump will tack on another 25 percent.
All cost included, Venezuelan crude can compete with Canadian crude. Canadian crude can come by pipeline but keep in mind that Canadian crude has the consistency of maple syrup so pumping that through a pipe takes a lot of energy so proximity does not necessarily mean cheap. Venezuelan crude comes by ship to close refineries in the South plus it sells at a nice discount to Canadian crude. Put together Venezuela could take over a good part of Canadian crude’s market share. Before we bought much more oil from Venezuela than Canada and Canada was able to obtain market share not on price but thanks to Chavez and his successor driving Venezuelan oil production into the ground and Canada was able to took over.
Economics say that we can go back to buying Venezuelan oil. The problem is political but that too can be overcome. Canada should not take US access to the US oil market as a slam-dunk because it isn’t and never has been.
Replacing Canadian crude is not as simple as one might think. Most of it goes to the midwestern U.S. to refineries that were built to handle that grade of crude. These refineries are not equipped to deal with WTI and the tariffs will drive prices up by 25% if imposed. Additional problems are job losses at the U.S. refineries that process the crude. Transporting fuel into these areas is possible but again more expensive. Prides went up by 15 cents in my market this week in anticipation of the logistical nightmare the oil companies are experiencing.
Yes, whoever we are, we should import oil from both Canada and Venezuela. Kind of like that Jefferson guy said: “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.”
“Should we import oil from Venezuela Instead of Canada?”
Absolutely.
VZ is ruled by a dictator and Trump loves dictators.
Trudeau and now Mark Carney look to be following in Chavez’s footsteps. They might be Chavez light but the direction is disturbingly the same when it comes to economics and especially basic rights.
US consumes aprox. 7bn barrels / yr. Produces 4.7bn barrels, imports 3 bn barrels / yr. 1.7 bn barrels from Canada, 97% of its oil exports. Venezuela exprts 85mn barrels to the US or 2.8% of imports vs. 57% of imports from Canada. That would be a tall order, politics or no politics.
If Canada exports 97% of its oil exports to the US … which it does … then …
30% of Canada’s oil exports are sent through the newly expanded Trans Mountain pipeline to the west coast and loaded on ships. Most of that oil still goes to the US, but it could all be sent to Asia as well.
Canada needs to build more pipelines east to west, and to tidewater, to give themselves more flexibility in their exports. This would likely raise the price of WCS oil closer to WTI and dramatically reduce the discount that the US currently takes advantage of.
They need pipelines to the Atlantic also but Quebec refuses and will always refuse. In some ways Quebec acts as if it is still a colonial possession like some of France’s colonial remnants always threatening to leave but never really going all the way thereby obtaining sometimes ridiculous concessions because of those threats to leave. I don’t blame them. It obviously works for Quebec.
Recent rumblings from Canada seem to imply that there is a new sense of urgency to build east-west pipelines, even from Quebec. We can probably thank Trump for bringing Canadians together to respond to our US aggression.
Canada took lessons from Quebec PapaDave. Pierre Trudeau started that ball rolling.
“Should we import oil from Venezuela Instead of Canada?”
This is possible if we invest a lot in Venezuela over the next decade to increase their production 5x-7x. And build a lot of new US pipelines to transfer Venezuelan oil from the gulf to where it is needed in the US.
We would also be paying $10 to $20 per barrel more for this oil than what we currently pay Canada for theirs.
So it would be an unnecessarily long and expensive process to replace oil from our former best friend with oil from a corrupt dictatorship.
Venezuela currently produces roughly 1 mbpd of oil and uses half of it domestically. They export around 0.5 mbpd.
Canada currently exports 4.3 mbpd to the US at very attractive prices.
The midwest PADD 2 refining region uses 3 mbpd, all of which comes from Canadian pipelines. There is no way to get Venezuelan oil from the gulf to the midwest refining region.
For the foreseeable future, there is NO alternative to our importing over 4 mbpd of Canadian oil. The fact that we are adding a 10% tariff to that oil is just shooting ourselves in the foot.
Add on the horrible messaging it sends from a MAGA standpoint. Especially after capturing and sending away there people to prison. Not a wise move.
Benezuela should become 53rd state after Greenland,Kanada, then Benezuela, and a small strip of the former mexican lands bordering the Gulf of America, allowing land transport of goods to ports on the Yuccatan to Benezuela etc.
We should also consider Norway as 54th state. We will need a land base to conduct surveillance on Denmark when it tries to steal Trumpland (formerly Greenland).
Strategic geographic relationships will ensure a peaceful future as Europe slides into prolonged anarchy and economic depression, as NGO funded gangs and factions continue the destruction of European ideals and norms.
Been playing Risk again?
Anything we can do to drive up the costs of core, necessary materials like oil, steel, aluminum and wood we should jump on. Manufacturers in these sectors are huge contributors to the GOP, and union laborers in these sectors are well paid and Republican voters. Sure it will drive up prices for everything else and make the USA less competitive on world markets for the long term, but think how much we will own the libs!
XOM, CVX and CNOOC should cont to pay Maduro dividends and settle the other issues.
Fentanyl and the U.S. Opioid EpidemicOpioid addiction has become one of the United States’ biggest killers, endangering public health, the economy, and national security. But closing the floodgates on fentanyl poses a significant foreign policy challenge.https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/fentanyl-and-us-opioid-epidemic
The Fentanyl that is confiscated could be added to the Canadian water supplies to make them more docile or easily controlled to raise the awareness of the once in a lifetime opportunity to become a state of the USA, and participate in true liberty and freedom for their (former) nation and children.
If infiltrating the water supplies proves to be problematic, plan b would be infiltration of their Maple Syrup production and stores. MKsyrup is the code name, keep it under your hat.
Absolutely Not!
Since Sept 11 2001 the US became more fragile. It’s suffering from persistent crises.
Maduro, who survived two assassination attempts, rules with an iron fist. Trump, who
survived two assassination attempts, is doing what he promised his voters to do, while ignoring the radical elite, the hostile media, the clowns and the judges who support them. The Euro zone trust in Trump is growing. He is the only one who can bring peace to Ukraine, the Red Sea and the ME. The “I like Trump” movement is growing. In China Xi rules with an iron fist. Centrifugal forces are threatening him. Trump’s negative feedback loop increases those forces. If chaos takes over China ==> Maduro will flip sides.
MVAA, Make Venezuela American Again, is a hat I’d be willing to wear while my MAGA hat is at the cleaners.
We need to get Musk busy designing cars with higher roof lines so that hats in general, and men and ladies hats in particular, can be worn in public on a daily basis to help return us to the more refined society that existed when Hatteries, and Haberdashers were an every day experience.
The return of the American Hat business will infuse domestic industry with pride, passion, and power to change our lives.
Borsalino hats are back !
In Europe I have seen more support for Trump in the last two months than I have ever seen. There is also a good drop in confidence in the EU elites who seem to love meetings and declarations but little actual movement. They are subject to a surprising amount of oblomovism and mirror the lack of initiative we saw in the Biden
administration. They don’t believe in themselves anymore.
Five words:
Maduro bad dude, HELL NO
Shall we throw the baby out with the petroleum then?
Very smart. Support a regime that is destroying millions of lives and driving out-migration and repudiate the country that has always been an ally and supports a culture that is most like yours with hundreds of years of shared history. With friends like that who needs………?
seems a rather cavalier attitude, if we only trade with people who are exactly like us, well we will simply never have any exotic tropical drinks or exciting passionate dances.
I maybe wrong here but I think here is what will happen:
– destabilize the economy to slow it
– divide the people and blame immigrants for citizens not doing well anymore
– kick out all non citizens and empower citizens
– everything becomes affordable due to oversupply and declining demand
– economic recovery begins for citizens with immigration never again
– declare victory for citizens first.
We’re definitely looking at a lengthy detox period, that’s for sure.
There may be swelling, cramps, and a general feeling of fatigue for a short duration, gradually fading away and being replaced by an overall sense of well being.
If you replace “immigrants” by “Jews,” you have the Nazi party’s agenda during the Great Depression.
and if you replace red with black, then you have a ledger you can use to leverage your business into a billion dollar tech company.
Still its always just wishing, never reality.Nazi’s under every table, behind every rock, falling from the sky, its like a bad b movie, people with no imagination, reliving their fears in public and trying to convince us their madness is normal.
Quite different. A lot of immigration on America in the last 25 years was at the expense of opportunities for the citizen. Globalization was bad enough but there was no need to keep importing immigrants on work visas. I’m an immigrant myself and have seen the negative effects of globalization and flood of immigrants. America needs to go back to 1980s levels of immigration. There are enough workers and new kids entering the labor force of citizens. What the flood of immigration has actually caused has actually created a spike of demand that has caused prices of everything to spike especially in the last 10 years.
There are “not sees” in every government agency apparently. DOGE is uncovering them.
If you replace “immigrants” by “cuddly teddy bears” then you have the present Democrat Party’s agenda.
The Trump administration should focus on cutting gov debt and transferring power to the states and that’s what they are doing since Jan 20.
I noticed that federal debt is way down since January 20. Finally, somebody has an explanation.
In 2023 Chevron bought Hess for $53B, Chevron, Exxon and CNOOK extract oil in Lisa across from Guyana and Venezuela. Maduro claims Guyana. Maduro threatened to invade Guyana. Hush money may have stopped him. Mike Pompeo tried to oust him during Trump I. If Trump try to cripple Venezuela Maduro might blowup Lisa, sending XOM and CVX down. We should stick with Canada, Venezuela, Argentina and Lisa,
if we just rename Venezuela to South Texas, and make current Texas, North Texas, we could get away with it. Most people’s sense of geography is worse than their fashion sense and they wouldn’t notice for decades..
Yes we should import oil from Venezuela. It took Chevron billions of dollars to develop refining to import this heavy crude from the Gulf, not a Trans Canadian pipeline. We can’t keep flip flopping in the world’s supply chain.
If you don’t want to flip-flop, like to deal with friendly neighbors instead of thugs, then we should stick with Canada.
And if we want lower oil prices, just remove the damn sanctions.
Thank you for honest and balanced opinion. Hard to find these days.
yes.
This mental image of a crew in the White House busily setting millions of tariff amounts brings to mind Nixon’s wage and price controls. It also brings to mind local city councils using police powers to insure that grocery stores use the proper kinds of bags.
Let’s file this under “I Thought We Won The Cold War!?!”
We don’t need a crew. We have the random number generator.
Random Number Generator, loving referred to as “The Nancy Pelosi Machine” by white house staff..
Apples and oranges.
‘Chevron has previously argued its withdrawal from Venezuela would destabilize the local economy, encouraging further migration.’
No worries, the next Democrat President/Supreme Court will gladly let all the people in Venezuela into the United States illegally.
My dad always said you can’t spell Venezuela without Chevron.
Dad never won a spelling bee, but somehow he had a point.
I think that’s the wrong question to ask. The right question is, “who are the bagholders and suckers that will fall for investing billions in shipping and other infrastructure to move oil from Venezuela to the U.S. knowing Trump can renege his amazing deal at his next temper tantrum?”
If I were in the oil business, I wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole. I wouldn’t do much of anything except trade around the volatility created by Trump. That’s the global business playbook until he’s out or the mid-terms.
Also, if you succeed in buying less from Canada, and it drives down the Canadian economy, then guess what?
One of your major buyers of US goods will be buying less.
Buy you get to support a corrupt third world nation.
Beware of pyrrhic victories.
Trump wants to drive the Canadian economy down so much that they’ll be begging to join the US. No Quebec, though.
There is , I’m told, an entire CIA program, counterfeiting Loonies and Toonies, and pumping millions of gallons of synthetic Maple Syrup into the Canadian Strategic Syrup Reserves to collapse the economy and buy it up for pennies on the Loonies.
MKsyrup, look it up. I’m looking at lake front property in B.C., when it drops to 20$ an acre, I’m scooping up 30 or 40 acres for a hideaway.
What the heck, lets invade Venezuela too!
Our troops, need on the ground training. Our strategic reserve needs refilling and soon it will be winter in the southern hemisphere.
we can belly crawl from Argentina and they’ll never see us sneaking across the border.
I’ve always liked Maduro. So, yes. Let’s go with Venezuela.
I’ve stocked up on Castrol, so I’m good.
200 countries and 13,000 tariff lines can easily be handled by an Excel spreadsheet. And there is a nifty random number generator in Excel; I am sure Musk’s kid know how to use it to fill in the 2,600,000 numbers required by the reciprocal tariff strategy.
Now you’re thinking. Change their tariffs every day with the random number generator. Keep the bastards guessing.
This random number idea has great promise.
How often do we spin the wheel? I think once a week.
We can do a national pool with a billion $ prize at $10 per entry. Anyone who gets all 200 countries right wins $1billion tax free.
I think we should let the kids decide the base number for each country.
The wheel has the multiplier 1.00 to 1.10 in increments of 0.1.
But numbers can repeat.
The odds of winning would be miniscule, 1/10 to the 200th power. But with a Billion prize tax free, people would play.
And to keep people interested there would be bonus prices for anyone who gets 10 consecutive countries correct. say $2000 tax free.
And every week you play, you get a ball in the national end of year lotto with your SS# on it. 1 percent of all money collected goes into a big pot, winner take all tax free.
No one would ever win $1 billion straight up in the weekly pool, but who knows how big the national pot could get if people played enough.
Your recommended advanced algo is called a “Lottery.”
sounds like March Madness on steroids.
Excel won’t work. The actual number of permutations would be astronomical and I can’t find an online calculator that can compute the numbers.
1300 tariff variables (not 13,000) on 200 countries would = 7.49703565 E+240 combinations.
Considering an average galaxy has about 200 billion stars, you’d run out of galaxies first before you could figure out the tariff combinations.
It would be ultra funny if countries around the world started changing their tariffs daily to mess with Trump (not that I’m suggesting any nation on earth do that) 😉
Actually, you have to deal with a few more numbers. The US customs code, officially called the Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States (HTSUS), has approximately 19,000 to 20,000 tariff lines. On February 16, 2025, there were 19,615 tariff lines.
just use recursion, and rounding errors. when in doubt add the speed of light squared.
Just because our proto-dictator has no ethics or morals, it doesnt mean we have to have none. Any money being sent to Maduro or Putin or Xi goes to support other dictatorships around the world. Canada did absolutely nothing to us for 200 years, and functions as de-facto imperialist member of the American commonwealth (our very own India). I am sad about what Venezuela has been turned into, but not one dime should go to them for anything, no matter how much heavy, sour crude they have.
“Canada did absolutely nothing to us for 200 years”. Did you forget about Rush (the band)?
It wasnt until my 50s that I even could make out the word “Subdivisions”
Scott… I agree with your views on Maduro and Putin etc…but I disagree about Canada. No country can be more fortunate than to have a benevolent neighbor. They have liked us and supported us as a neighbor. We’ve never had to see them as a threat. Why do we need more enemies right now?
Sorry Scott… I misread what you were saying. It’s clear you were referring to India.
Yeah, India was to UK what Canada can be seen as being to the US. Mostly quiet and full of resources.
As a Canadian with many friends and some family in USA, my family has traveled at least once per year, to various parts of USA for 45 years. To me United States and Canada were clones, with some significant superficial differences. And now with a voting difference of less than 1.5% in the November election, Canadians are now the enemy ? Canada would never be treated as a State of the USA, only like Puerto Rico; as a protectorate.
Despite any jokes I’ve made, I completely believe that Canada should – and will – remain a sovereign nation. I wish you had a First Amendment, but your healthcare system is less messed up than ours. Live long and prosper!
No problem. If things keep on as they are, the US will likely break up into chunks, in coming years – some of which may want to attach themselves to Canada.
probably a bad idea unless they want General Sherman marching into Canada…