Ben Rhodes

Let's watch.

So what's funny about the Exxon guy's comments is he's describing like the political climate under Maduro, which Trump just said he toppled that government to change to make it easier for oil to get up.

He was just like mad at the guy's tone.

Yeah.

And just some more context about Venezuela's oil reserves.

So like, again, the off-sited statistics that they have 17% of the world's oil reserves.

I've seen some people question like where that stat came from or whether it's accurate.

Regardless, they have a lot of oil, but Venezuela currently produces less than 1% of the supply.

And the reason is partly because of US sanctions, but also because Venezuela's oil infrastructure has been left to just languish and rot for decades.

So you got like processing facilities, they're antiquated and don't work.

The Atlantic had a long piece about this.

They talked about there being miles of crumbling pipelines you'd have to rebuild.

Bloomberg says it takes five days to load a tanker with oil versus one day seven years ago.

The machinery there they describe as being ransacked and sold on the black market.

One of the main refineries only operates intermittently.

All the professional people were fired by Hugo Chavez back in the day, and many of them never came back.

And so they quoted an expert in the Bloomberg piece who said it will take 100 billion to get production back up to the 1970s peak, which is 3.5 million barrels a day.

NPR cited an even higher figure, 183 billion, to get production back to the 90s levels, which is about 3 million barrels a day.

Like you said, Ben, I mean, Trump wants the money for those investments to come from the oil companies.

But as the Exxon guy said, they're anxious about it.