De amerikanske raffineriene langs kysten i sør er laget for å ta i mot denne oljen, ikke oljen fra fracking. Den skal visstnok også være mer effektiv å raffinere.
Venezuela’s Orinoco oil sands are less viscous than Canada’s Athabasca oil sands – meaning they can be produced by more conventional means – but they are buried too deep to be extracted by surface mining.
The technology needed to recover ultra-heavy crude oil, such as in most of the Orinoco Belt, may be much more complex and expensive than that of Saudi Arabia’s light oil industry.[17] The USGS did not make any attempt to determine how much oil in the Orinoco Belt is economically recoverable.[13] Unless the price of crude rises, it is likely that the proven reserves will have to be adjusted downward.[18]
According to Rapier, Venezuela’s oil reserves are largely of “extra-heavy crude oil” which might “not be economical to produce” under certain market conditions. (Reuters columnist John Kemp reports that Venezuela’s “very dense crudes… are complicated to process,” and are priced at a “large discount,” when compared to the crudes of other producers.[20]) Rapier notes that the near-quadrupling of Venezuela’s claimed “proven” reserves, between 2005 and 2014—from 80 Gbbl to 300 Gbbl—may have been due to soaring crude oil prices that made Venezuela’s normally uneconomical heavier crude suddenly market-viable to produce, and thus elevating it to within Venezuela’s “proven” reserves. Consequently, Rapier contends, periods of lower crude oil market prices may remove those reserves from the “proven” category—placing Venezuela’s viable “proven reserves” well below Saudi Arabia’s.[21]
