Do you support the overthrow of Maduro in Venezuela?

[MADem]

44. No one, save the Chinese (buying at fire sale prices), wants VZ oil.

It's heavy and it is sour and their fields are in such shitty shape they aren't pumping at anywhere near capacity because of poor maintenance. They are pumping less now than they were in the eighties.

They aren't RELIABLE suppliers, you see.

The president in December devalued the currency in an effort to reverse the decline of an ailing oil sector. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in its February market report said member state Venezuela was producing around 2.3 million barrels of oil per day, about 1 percent less than the year before Chavez died and almost half of the level from 1997, the year before he took power.

Oil accounts for 95 percent of the country's export earnings and nearly half of its budget revenues. While the decline in production since 1997 can be attributed in part to field maturation, most of the problem can be blamed on mismanagement of state-owned oil company Petroleos de Venezuela, or PDVSA.

http://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Bitter-Irony-in-Venezuelas-Oil-Sector.html

Venezuelan oil production is declining, and a lot of what they are pumping goes to pay back China for those loans the Chinese made to Maduro:

Venezuelan oil sales to the U.S. are approaching 28-year lows as the country turns to China amid a shale boom that’s flooding U.S. refineries. Now a Canada-U.S. pipeline threatens to further curb its Gulf of Mexico access.

Venezuelan exports of crude and petroleum products to the U.S. averaged 792,000 barrels a day in the first 11 months of 2013, which would be the lowest annual rate since 1985, according to data published yesterday on the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s website.

State-run Petroleos de Venezuela SA, which oversees the world’s largest oil reserves, is sending hundreds of thousands of barrels a day to China to pay back government loans. At the same time, refiners along the U.S. Gulf Coast are sourcing more domestic supply as a surge in drilling shale rock sends output to the highest in a quarter-century. A proposed pipeline to transport Canadian crude from oil sands in Alberta to U.S. refining centers could further restrict Venezuela’s access to profitable export markets, according to Tissot Associates.

“As more heavy Canadian crude comes to the Gulf Coast, it’s going to displace Seaborne heavy crude barrels from exporters such as Venezuela,” Amrita Sen, chief oil market strategist at Energy Aspects Ltd., said by phone from London.

And we aren't "in." VZ runs their own show--and they run it badly. THAT is why they are having problems.