The US has taken the oil that was on seized Venezuelan tankers and will process it in US refineries, President Donald Trump said in a New York Post interview that was published yesterday. “Let’s put it this way – they don’t have any oil. We take the oil,” Trump told the newspaper.
The oil is being refined in “various places” including Houston, he said.
The US military has seized seven Venezuela-linked tankers since the start of Trump’s month-long campaign to control Venezuela’s oil flows.
Trump said on Tuesday that his administration had taken 50 million barrels of oil out of Venezuela, and was selling some of it in the open market.
The first naphtha cargo for Venezuela as part of an oil deal agreed between Caracas and Washington this month arrived in the country’s waters in a tanker chartered by trading house Vitol, ship tracking data showed.
This month, after the US captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Caracas and Washington agreed to a flagship $2 billion oil supply deal to sell up to 50m barrels of Venezuelan oil in storage.
The agreement, which is giving traders Vitol and Trafigura initial access to Venezuela’s oil for reselling to refiners worldwide, also includes the supply of much-needed heavy naphtha to dilute the Opec country’s extra-heavy oil output.
The UK-flagged tanker Hellespont Protector carrying some 460,000 barrels of US heavy naphtha was approaching Venezuela’s Jose port, according to the shipping data and documents from state company PDVSA. It was scheduled to discharge there in the coming days.
PDVSA, which typically imports some 100,000 barrels per day (bpd) of naphtha and light crude to dilute its heaviest crude output, had not received any naphtha cargoes since late December, the documents showed.
Venezuela’s interim president Delcy Rodriguez said yesterday that 626 people have been released from prison to date as part of an ongoing release process, yet she did not specify the timeline of the reported releases.
Venezuelan human rights group Foro Penal has confirmed the release of just 154 political prisoners in Venezuela since January 8.
Rodriguez said that she is due to have a call tomorrow with the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, to ask the UN to verify the lists of those released so far in the Andean nation.
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