page_title: Oil reserves in Venezuela
section_title: Orinoco Belt
hierarchical_section_title: Oil reserves in Venezuela / Orinoco Belt
caption_attribution_description: English: A plot of the reported proven oil reserves for Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. In January 2011, Venezuela claimed to surpass Saudi Arabia as the controller of the world's largest proven reserves. Data for 1980 to 2008 is based on the 2010 world oil report by BP at [1]. Data for 2009 is from OPEC at [2]. The 2011 data point for Venezuela is based on the January 2011 announcement by Hugo Chavez [3]
context_page_description: The proven oil reserves in Venezuela are recognized as the largest in the world, totaling 300 billion barrels as of 1 January 2014. In early 2011, then-president Hugo Chávez and the Venezuelan government announced that the nation's oil reserves had surpassed that of the previous long-term world leader, Saudi Arabia. OPEC said that Saudi Arabia's reserves stood at 265 billion barrels in 2009. The 2019 edition of the BP Statistical Review of World Energy reports the total proved reserves of 303.3 billion barrels for Venezuela and 297.7 billion barrels for Saudi Arabia.
  Venezuela's development of its oil reserves has been affected by political unrest in recent years. In late 2002, nearly half of the workers at the state oil company PDVSA went on strike, after which the company fired 18,000 of them, draining the company of technical knowledge and expertise. Venezuela's crude oil is very heavy by international standards, and as a result much of it must be processed by specialized domestic and international refineries. Venezuela continues to be one of the largest suppliers of oil to the United States, sending about 1.4 million barrels per day to the U.S.
context_section_description: In addition to conventional oil, Venezuela has oil sands deposits similar in size to those of Canada, and approximately equal to the world's reserves of conventional oil.  Venezuela's Orinoco tar sands are less viscous than Canada's Athabasca oil sands – meaning they can be produced by more conventional means – but they are buried too deep to be extracted by surface mining. Estimates of the recoverable reserves of the Orinoco Belt range from 100 billion barrels (16×10⁹ m³) to 270 billion barrels (43×10⁹ m³). In 2009, the USGS updated this value to 513 billion barrels (8.16×10¹⁰ m³).
  According to the USGS, the Orinoco Belt alone is estimated to contain 900–1,400 billion barrels (2.2×10¹¹ m³) of heavy crude in proven and unproven deposits.  Of this, the USGS estimated that 380–652 billion barrels (1.037×10¹¹ m³) could be technically recoverable, which would make Venezuela's total recoverable reserves (proven and unproven) among the largest in the world.  The technology needed to recover ultra-heavy crude oil, such as in most of the Orinoco Belt, may be much more complex and expensive than that of Saudi Arabia's light oil industry. The USGS did not make any attempt to determine how much oil in the Orinoco Belt is economically recoverable. Unless the price of crude rises, it is likely that the proven reserves will have to be adjusted downward.
caption: History of Venezuela's claimed reserves (red) in comparison to those of Saudi Arabia (blue)
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