Friday, February 29, 2008

China Steps Forward as Venezuela`s Key Oil Buyer

China could be the near monopoly buyer of Venezuelan fuel oil after Beijing stepped up financial aid to cash-strapped Caracas, but it will be years before higher volumes of crude from the OPEC member begins flowing East. Venezuela is struggling with multiple problems including a cash crunch caused by President Hugo Chavez's use of oil money to fund socialist projects, surplus fuel oil due to refinery outages and must seek alternative buyers for the crude it stopped shipping to Exxon Mobil Corp due to a legal row. In an unprecedented move to ease its cash squeeze, state-run PDVSA had asked for $1 billion upfront payment in a tender to sell eight fuel oil cargoes of 1.8 million barrels each. The tender was scrapped when potential buyers balked, but PDVSA is still holding talks with PetroChina, traders said.

1 comment:

  1. "cash-strapped" my ass. This is just the usual Wall St. spin greedsters yapping. Venezuela could deficit spend for quite some time if they needed to. Which they don't. And the present bottlenecks with regards to refining Venezuela's heavy crude will be quickly overcome, permanently. And then what will these stooges grouse about next.

    Shut up, you corporate whores.

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