Venezuela will ship sanctioned oil to U.S. indefinitely, sources say

[AloeVera]

7. So the oil-wealth is a sleight-of-hand, a mirage? Will Chavez have the last laugh?

Even so, whatever it is we’re doing in Venezuela isn’t really a war for oil. It is, instead, a war for oil fantasies. The vast wealth Trump imagines is waiting there to be taken doesn’t exist.

You may have heard that Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves — 300 billion barrels. You probably don’t know that Venezuela’s reported oil reserves tripled while Hugo Chavez was president. This increase, from roughly 100 billion to 300 billion barrels, didn’t reflect major new discoveries or exploration. Instead, it reflected the Chavez government’s decision to reclassify the country’s Orinoco Belt heavy oil as “proved” — oil that can be recovered with reasonable certainty under existing economic and operating conditions:

As Torsten Slok of Apollo, who recently made this point, notes, “Much of the oil is extra-heavy, which has low recovery and a high cost to produce.” This suggests that Venezuela’s claims to have immense usable oil reserves were politically motivated hype.

Bolding mine.