Lake Maracaibo
With the discovery of a vast amount of crude oil under Lake Maracaibo, but unable to send it to market because the channel into Lake Maracaibo was too shallow to allow oceangoing oil tankers to enter the lake, Pan American Petroleum and Transport Company, who held the lease on a large area of Lake Maracaibo, incorporated Lago Oil &amp; Transshipment Co. The purpose of that company was to run lake tankers, to bring crude oil from Lake Maracaibo to Aruba. There, the oil was stored ashore in large tanks, later loaded onto larger oceangoing tankers and taken to the United States for refining into finished petroleum products such as gasoline, diesel fuel, Bunker C and heating oil.