Venezuela’s New Oil Production Target Is Completely Unrealistic

At the start of 2021, Venezuela’s Oil Minister Tareck El Aissami announced that national oil company PDVSA was targeting petroleum production of 1.5 million barrels per day by the end of the year. When he made that statement in March 2021, Venezuela’s national oil company was pumping, according to OPEC, an average of 525,000 barrels of crude oil per day, or a third of that target. A week ago, PDVSA gave a clear indication of just how unrealistic that target was by reducing that daily average production target by roughly a third…