BP Announces that Venezuela Now Have the Largest Oil Reserves in the World

er....

Saudi Arabia and the US have been kissing each others ass for a long time. We want their oil, they want our military toys.

Now if Saudi Arabia were to develop an overtly anti-American attitude, then it would be time for them to start being worried.

Er...read some history. Saudi Arabia got the Iraq/Afghanistan/Egypt/Libya/Vietnam/Somalia/Cuba treatment 90 years ago, the moment post industrial countries found out about the oil. Yeah, the UK was the swinging dick at the start but the US helped and after they got wrecked by the Germans and lost their force projection abilities, our government took over the role of big bad and has been ever since; AKA the age of the US(and USSR) superpower. This is why most of the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia.

Your posts never fail to disappoint, I could set my watch by them.

PS - In short the Government the Saudi Arabians have is the government the US leadership/ruling class want for them, which happens to be the opposite of a good one. And the US has helped maintain it through violence, not democracy.

And they have yet to get back on their feet again.

Did we ever?

When Saudi Arabia financed and manned 9/11, we gave them a pass and bombed their neighbor.

Are we going to bomb Columbia, Brazil, or Guyana?

We gotta bomb somebody.

We call it "drug interdiction".

He hasn't demonstrated a need to flaunt his junk, AFAICT. Maybe he's not insecure about it.

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it's harder to set up some kind of CIA executed event, though we can assume they have all kinds of plans!

Can't have any oil on the planet not under the control of multi-national oil corporations.

This has great possibilities, almost as good as annexing Canada.

Come on, you know you want to!!!

who is probably dying before long may he rip

I wonder how long before we go to war in Venezuela?

If Romney wins...

OIL

or Saudi.

That's not really a helpful graphic without such a context, we have bases in an *insane* number of locations.

and it continues to operate as an Ecuadorian base which it always was.

http://www.brazzil.com/p128may03.htm

There is no US base in Iquitos. there is a Peruvian naval base.

There is no base in Bolivia

there is no base in the Triple frontera

the bases in Colombia listed are all Colombian bases.

ther e is no US base in Tierra de Fuego

thanks Miss Information.

you did miss the bases in Puerto Rico, a US territory.

This is the most current one I could find. Maybe you can do better.

Pentagon Building Bases in Central America and Colombia

http://forusa.org/blogs/john-lindsay-poland/pentagon-building-bases-central-america-colombia/8445

And one from this week. (Thanks for the push, I almost missed this.)

U.S. Military Wants More Drones In Latin America

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/13/us-military-wants-more-dr_n_1593128.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolemaida_Air_Base

Wiki article on one of the bases in your article. the very first sentence, "Tolemaida Air Base (ICAO: SKTI) is an Colombian military air base located in Melgar."

its a Colombian base. we already know that the US gives military aid to Colombia and other nations for defense which includes construction activities on host country military bases but there are those who always seem to interpret that as "US building bases in Latin America".


there was just an article yesterday on Chavez and drones too.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8202724.stm

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1915825,00.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/18/colombia-us-bases-unconstitutional

http://www.ipsnews.net/2009/07/colombia-uribe-agrees-us-access-to-military-bases/

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/world/americas/23colombia.html

in fact as US operations, or leased like the one in Honduras or previously at the Ecuadorian base in Manta. However, as you posted those Colombian bases were never approved or constructed.

the majority of the "US" bases on that map you posted are existing host country military bases (including those in Colombia), nothing was constructed, or simply rumours.

Remember, you said the US is surrounding Venezuela with bases.

US establishes new military bases in South America
(Translation of an article from Brasil de Fato of São Paulo for May 15. See original here.)
by Indira Carpio Olivo and Ernesto J. Navarro

On March 24, 2012, the web site aporrea.org published a story from four days earlier, taken from matrizur.org, stating that the governor of the province of El Chaco was granting permission for installation by the Southern Command of a military base in that Argentine territory.

The story reads, “The building, which will be inaugurated this month, is located on the grounds of the airport in Resistencia, the capital of the northern province of El Chaco, is in the final stage of construction and will be the first such operations center in Argentina. All that is lacking is to equip it with information technology and then to turn over the facility and to finish with the training of personnel,” says Colonel Edwin Passmore of the Southern Command, who had met weeks earlier with Governor Jorge Capitanich.”

Days later, on April 5, the Chile of Sebastián Piñera opened the doors to the same Southern Command. A military complex located at Fuerte Aguayo in the community of Concón, in Valparaíso Region, some 130 kilometers northeast of the capital, Santiago, was opened ceremoniously. In the midst of protests, United States Defense Secretary Leon Panetta appeared, declaring that it is not a military base operated by his country but a Chilean base for training United Nations peace forces.

The Southern Command currently operates military bases in Paraguay, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Colombia and Peru. In an interview on the radio program La Brújula del Sur, Walter Goobar, writer and editor for the Sunday weekly Miradas al Sur and columnist for the daily Tiempo Argentino, commented that the government of the United States no longer calls these installations, financed by the Southern Command, “military bases,” but in the current terminology they are now referred to as “Cooperative Security Locations” (CSL) or “Forward Operating Locations” (FOL).

More:
http://lo-de-alla.org/2012/05/us-establishes-new-military-bases-in-south-america/

Of course we know that doesn't include all the bases in Central America, and places like Curacao, etc., with THREE bases in Honduras, the others added AFTER the military coup. Sad, by all means.

how much of that is recoverable is highly questionable, and considering that heavy oil recovery is a very environmentally damaging process (we're talking about oil sands and tar sands, like Canada) that's not economically viable with an oil price under c. $80-90 a barrel, and probably not viable at all in the long run given the attendant costs...this is probably pretty meaningless (and it's yet another sign that the peak of conventional oil production has passed).

So it will be extracted, eventually, we're not moving off of fossil fuels any time soon. By the time we're pumping their heavy crude we'll start working on our oil shale and we'll then become the country with the "largest oil reserves." The capitalists have no desire for energy independence, they just believe the almighty market will work to their ends. So far they've been fairly on the mark about that, but that's only because we've found newer and newer techniques to get at fossil fuels.

It's almost pure heavy/ extra-heavy oil, no sand is mixed with it. So there's no energy cost for separating the oil from the sand, just from some chemical elements. All in all, the average cost of production in the Orinoco belt is around 20$. The Alberta oil sands produce for around 50$ a barrel.

...and plenty of rumors that their reserves are much less.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/feb/08/saudi-oil-reserves-overstated-wikileaks

Look, I care about the environment. But peak oil folks are tackling the issue of the environment and social impac oil within an ineffective paradigm. You'll notice that the article says oil reserves increased by 1.9% and will likely continue to increase if the price of oil stays high. Everybody knows there's a finite amount of oil, but running out of it is neither imminent or particularly galvanizing. More important are the wars, politics, oppression, pollution, spills, climate change, etc. that are tied to our use of oil. Saudi Arabia's anti-democratic monarchy, Nigeria's oil violence an so on, and so on need to be addressed head on.

Sometimes I notice that the peak oil threat is promoted by the same groups that exploit the oil and by the car industry oligopoly. Firstly, they can hijack the issue of intensive oil dependence and point out the least important problem that affects us/ will affect us during this century, the depletion, in order to cover the political and the environmental problems, which are way more urgent. Secondly, they create an issue which will be easy to overcome thanks to... themselves and their discovery of new reserves. It's interesting to note that Venezuela's proven reserves have been multiplied by 40 in the last 30 years .

Peak Oil doesn't say that we're going to run out of oil. Peak Oil proponents have been saying for a LONG time that we're going to run out of the easy to get, cheap oil. The fact that we're now including reserves like this and the US oil shales in total extractable oil reserves vindicates what Peak Oil theory has stated over and over in the past, that we're past Peak and oil will only continue to increase in price as time goes on.

Generally speaking, I don't think oil is "easy to get" or "cheap." Basically, to get oil, in today's economy, you need the backing of a major industrial company or a national government. You're likely to need police or military protection in some part of your operation. Sure, some oil can be gotten out of the ground with simpler and less expensive technology than the others, but it's just technology. The other factors -- pollution, politics, war, militarization, etc. -- make oil not easy.

It's not that peak oil folks don't have a point. They do. I just think it's an ineffective way of framing the issue. Let's put the pollution or humanitarian impacts first. Reaching a peak followed by declining production is not something that should worry us.

Also, harping on the peak confuses and misdirects environmentally minded students. They get caught up in the issue of conserving the resource rather than addressing it's problems.

Btw, I know a little something about this. I have a master's degree in Energy and Resources and another in mechanical engineering, and I work in the energy industry. I've seen students and professionals waste years worrying about an issue that should be much farther down on our priority list.

Hubbert's theory talks about depletion and decrease in world production (so basically, yes, slowly running out of oil sensu stricto, not running out of cheap oil).
So we'll be "past Peak" when world production decreases.... that's why Hubbert uses the word "peak", it describes the long run behavior of the produced volume.

Even in the Latin American forum, we've been discussing this for a couple of years.
But it's breaking news in the rest of the site, some even still doubt it...
It's not! a small world.

including in locations hard/dangerous to reach is 1.65 trillion barrels. Estimated usage in the near future aprox 100 million barrels per day (yes per DAY - that's 70 barrels per person per year world wide on average), works out to 45 years until it's all gone. I'll be 94 years old, my kids in their 60's. Well, we did have a nice run while it lasted I guess..... cheap plentiful food, easy cheap and fast world-wide transportation, and PLASTICS, don't forget the plastics.

I wonder why the wealthy elite (either corporate, political, or pseudo-religious) are trying to grab all that they can as quickly as they can from the rest of us????

Yep, it'$ a total my$tery. I mean, I am $o confu$ed by it. I can't $urmi$e why they tried to a$$a$$inate him, $ponsor a pliant oppo$ition that will bow before U$ bu$ine$$ intere$t$, and the re$t of it. Yep, it'$ a total my$tery.

PS: $$$

Oh well. At least there haven't been any exploding cigars...yet.

That oil rightly belongs to Exxon-Mobil and Conoco-Phillips, not the people of Venezuela.

Don't panic Venezuela -- we'll be right there!