Andrew Campbell

Well, that's the piece where it's very questionable whether this would be a good idea for the United States or any international oil companies.

I mean, the global oil market right now is very well supplied.

So that's good for consumers, good for oil consumers.

The prices are modest.

But for a country like Venezuela, whose oil reserves are some of the lowest quality oil reserves in the world, that's a really bad thing.

Even just producing it is very expensive due to the poor quality oil.

I mean, not anytime soon.

I mean, there's a little bit of kind of a grain of an idea there, which is the Gulf Coast in the United States has tremendous refining capacity.

Much of that capacity was built and expanded to process oil coming from Venezuela.

So the refineries are able to produce gasoline, get it into the market, lower prices for consumers.

But there are many other sources of oil too.

And the biggest source actually is U.S.

domestic oil.

And that is why prices in part are low right now.

It's hard to see how Venezuela really would have any impact on that, even if oil production increased substantially.

Thinking back to the Venezuela of the past, the 1990s Venezuela was highly investable.

There were many US oil companies, other foreign companies operating very profitably in the country at that time.

There were stable institutions.

There were stable, understandable courts.

There was a whole framework that was basically friendly to international investment.