LAKE MARACAIBO, Venezuela — On the western shore of Lake Maracaibo, workers use rakes and shovels to pull blobs of congealed oil out of the water, but the black goo sticks to everything — fishing nets, boats, outboard motors and even a calf that’s wondering around the beach.
The oil slicks, which cover vast stretches of the lakeshore, are the result of constant leaks from underwater oil wells and a spaghetti of aging pipelines that run along the lake bottom. The mess has driven away beachgoers and decimated the fishing industry on Lake Maracaibo, an immense, brackish tidal bay connected to the Caribbean Sea.
“Some days the fish come back all covered in oil,” says Joseiry Gotera, who manages a fishing cooperative on the lake. “You can’t sell them. You have to throw them away.”
After years of falling oil production amid the country’s worst economic crisis in history, Venezuela is resurrecting its beleaguered petroleum industry. The country is now producing 850,000 barrels of oil per day, according to Deputy Oil Minister Erick Pérez, more than twice the amount that the country was pumping three years ago. At a conference in the country’s capital of Caracas last week, Pérez predicted Venezuela would soon be producing 1 million barrels per day.
The country has a huge incentive to increase oil output because in October, Washington lifted oil sanctions against the country in exchange for pledges by Venezuela’s authoritarian government to set ground rules for a free presidential election next year. That has allowed Venezuela to resume exporting oil to the United States rather than sell it on the black market at steep discounts.
But experts and Venezuelan residents who live near production sites say that due to the deterioration of oil facilities, ramping up output is causing more accidents.
The state-run oil company, PDVSA, which produces the vast majority of the country’s oil, no longer publishes data on oil spills and did not respond to NPR’s requests for comment. But according to a report published in January by the independent Observatory of Political Ecology of Venezuela, there were at least 86 oil spills and natural gas leaks in Venezuela last year, up from 77 in 2021
“The facilities that are in the hands of PDVSA are in terrible, terrible shape,” says Francisco Monaldi, who directs the Latin America Energy Program at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy in Houston.
“I talked to service contractors that told me that things that were supposed to be done, say every two years, had not been done for eight years,” he adds. PDVSA “basically stopped doing any maintenance.”
Many of the accidents have occurred in or around Lake Maracaibo, which used to be ground zero for Venezuela’s oil industry. The country’s first major oil well was drilled here in 1914 and hundreds more followed. Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world and during the country’s peak production year in 1970 it produced more than 3.7 million barrels per day.
read more: https://www.npr.org/2023/11/29/1215547427/venezuela-oil-spill-maracaibo
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The mess has driven away beachgoers and decimated the fishing industry on Lake Maracaibo, an immense, brackish tidal bay connected to the Caribbean Sea.
One result is nearly constant leaks from pipelines, pumping stations and oil platforms, says Jesús Urbina, who works for the anti-corruption group Transparency International in western Venezuela.
A U.S. Agency for International Development report last year noted that many of Venezuela’s oil facilities are located within 30 miles of protected areas and said that contamination from the industry poses the main threat to country’s marine ecosystems.
The Trump administration said the sanctions aimed to prevent the government of President Nicolás Maduro from “plundering” Venezuela’s assets and resources at the expense of its people.
But over the past year, large oil slicks have fouled the beaches of the lakeside metropolis of Maracaibo, Venezuela’s second-biggest city, making them much harder for Venezuelan authorities to ignore.
But Monaldi, the Rice University analyst, says it will be difficult to entice international energy companies to invest in the oil industry around the lake due to environmental liabilities.
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