Venezuela’s Oil Is Like Solid Cold Char Kway Teow Paste — Plenty There, But Too Thick to Serve
Think of Venezuela’s oil like a giant wok full of super-thick char kway teow paste 🍜 — looks impressive, smells powerful, but you can’t serve it straight.
The “Heavy Oil = Too Thick to Eat” Problem
Venezuela’s oil is like char kway teow sauce that’s gone cold and solid.
At room temperature, it’s almost like black glue. You can’t pour it, you can’t cook with it, and customers won’t touch it.
To make it usable, you must add lighter ingredients:
Think of condensate and naphtha as oil, stock, or water
They thin the sauce so it can flow, be cooked, and finally served
Without these lighter ingredients, the “dish” just sits in the wok — inedible.
Why Venezuela Can’t Just “Sell Oil and Collect Money”
Most people imagine oil countries like a hawker selling Outram Park Fried Kway Teow:
Cook → sell → collect cash 💵
But Venezuela is more like a stall that:
Has mountains of thick solid sauce
But no cooking oil, no gas, no helpers
And must import basic ingredients just to make the food sellable
So its entire business depends on:
Imported light oil (ingredients)
Foreign technology (kitchen equipment)
International logistics (suppliers and delivery)
Break any one of these, and the stall shuts down — even if the storeroom is full.
What Happened After 2017 (Sanctions)
U.S. sanctions were like:
Cutting off the cooking oil supplier
Freezing the stall’s bank account
Banning new kitchen equipment
Suddenly, Venezuela couldn’t import the “oil and stock” needed to thin its heavy crude.
Result?
The cooking stopped, and output collapsed like a hawker stall losing gas overnight 🔥❌.
Where the Real Value Is
From Washington and big oil companies’ point of view, the real power isn’t:
Who owns the sauce
It’s:
Who controls the recipe
The kitchen
The supply chain
And the delivery to customers
That’s why $Chevron(CVX)$
It’s like the only experienced master chef left in the hawker centre, with:
Trained staff
Working kitchen
Existing supplier links
In the short term, it’s the only stall that can reopen fast and serve food again.
In One Line
Venezuela doesn’t have a “not enough oil” problem —
it has a “too thick to cook without imported ingredients” problem.
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