Venezuela's Lifeblood Ebbs Even as It Flows
www.nytimes.com February 26, 2003 By JUAN FORERO
CARACAS, Venezuela — Once more, tankers are setting sail loaded with crude bound for the United States, while government planners busily rebuild and reorganize the state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela, pondering how to function with 40 percent fewer workers.
Oil, the lifeblood of Venezuela, is running again after a paralyzing national strike, with production now topping two million barrels a day, say officials of the $46-billion-a-year company. They predict that Venezuela's oil industry, with a leaner government-run company leading the way, will soon churn out 3.1 million barrels daily, matching the pre-strike level.
"We are getting close to normal," said Enrique Salazar, a loading master on the Caribbean coast, peering from a control room as a tanker, the Morichal, took on 25,000 barrels an hour.
But oil analysts and economists say the government's rosy picture hides a painful truth about a 27-year-old company that was born when Venezuela nationalized oil production and quickly became one of Latin America's more highly regarded multinationals.
Petróleos de Venezuela has lost $4 billion in exports and nearly 16,000 workers, fired by the government for taking part in a walkout aimed at debilitating President Hugo Chávez's left-leaning government. That financial blow and the loss of workers with, on average, 17 years of experience could permanently hobble the company, keeping it from assuming its role as a leading world oil provider, analysts here and abroad say.
"It will not be the company it once was," said Mazhar al-Shereidah, an oil economist in Caracas who helped write oil regulations for the Chávez government. "For a country that depends on petroleum, now more than ever, the challenges are too great. You have to pray for Venezuela."
The dire predictions, if true, would indeed be disastrous for this country of 24 million, which depends on oil for half of government revenues and 80 percent of exports. It would also leave the United States — which has counted on Venezuelan oil for decades — without one of its most reliable suppliers as a possible war with oil-rich Iraq promises to batter energy markets.
The obstacles are daunting after the strike, which started to fizzle in February after two months. A lack of maintenance has caused sand to build up in the gelatinous deposits and the pressure to drop, making some fields worthless and threatening to cut production capacity by 300,000 or more barrels a day. And perhaps most troubling is that no one knows what Mr. Chávez's government has in store, though it has promised a wholesale revamping of what was once the world's second-largest oil company.
Reports from international analysts are blistering. UBS Warburg predicts that oil's contribution to gross domestic product will fall 22 percent in 2003, with Venezuela facing "a fiscal crisis of major proportions." Fitch Ratings says Venezuela's "image as a reliable crude oil supplier has been undermined" and will he hard to recover.
Analysts say the lack of technical expertise, combined with the financial straits, means that Petróleos de Venezuela will be unable, in the short term, to reach production levels of the prestrike days, when Venezuela was the world's fifth-largest oil exporter. Most recent production has been in fields that were easiest to restart, leading independent analysts to predict that Venezuela will, at best, produce 2.3 million barrels daily by year-end.
"We believe the company's role in Venezuela society has been permanently altered," a recent Deutsche Bank report said. Assuming average daily production of 1.7 million barrels for 2003, the bank estimated that oil revenue would reach only $14.1 billion, down nearly 50 percent from 2001.
The government is already preparing for the worst. The 2003 budget for the oil company was cut by $2.7 billion, to about $6 billion, while the income the government draws from oil is forecast by UBS Warburg to fall from $11.5 billion in 2002 to as little as $5 billion in 2003. The drop will make it especially difficult to raise the $5 billion the company would have spent to keep production steady.
Alí Rodríguez, the former leftist guerrilla turned president of Petróleos de Venezuela, does not gloss over the obstacles. But in an interview, Mr. Rodríguez said the doomsday predictions originated with dissident executives who hoped to undermine international confidence in the oil company to weaken Mr. Chávez.
He predicted that through sharp budget and personnel cuts, the company would reach 3.1 million barrels a day. And "with its resources," he said, "it is perfectly possible that it will even surpass that level."
To be sure, the Petróleos de Venezuela now emerging will be a far different company, in both its management and philosophy.
Gone will be the highly autonomous octopus that Mr. Rodríguez said functioned with great independence from the state, controlling revenues and influencing oil policies. The new company, taking advantage of some of the world's largest oil deposits outside the Middle East, "must give maximum contribution to the nonpetroleum sector, which is the majority of the people," Mr. Rodríguez said.
Still, even inside the gleaming office tower in Caracas where the company is based, the short-term outlook seems dismal as managers pore over financial statements.
"There is no investment, so there is no doubt that the company at this moment is very debilitated," Bernard Mommer, a close adviser to Mr. Rodríguez who is helping guide the restructuring, said in an interview. "Up ahead, we are going to have problems like how to recover the quality of the company."
Venezuela will benefit little from the higher world oil prices projected in coming months, since production capacity remains limited. By the time Petróleos de Venezuela is producing close to three million barrels daily — if it ever does — prices are likely to have stabilized, analysts say.
In the meantime, Mr. Rodríguez and his managers are busy splitting the company into three divisions: a natural gas branch to develop the largest deposits in Latin America, and companies in the east and west intended to make obsolete the executive offices in Caracas, where antigovernment activities percolated.
Venezuela may also unload foreign assets, like refineries in the United States that operate under the Citgo chain, which is wholly owned by Petróleos de Venezuela, and other installations in Europe and the Caribbean.
Publicly, officials deny the companies are for sale. But Mr. Mommer said Citgo remained overly expensive while providing scant returns.
"The sophisticated part of our business, refining, that's not our business," Mr. Mommer said. "Exploration and production, that is where the big money is."
Such a sale would "dismember" the company, warned José Toro Hardy, an influential former board member, because Citgo refineries are specially outfitted to process Venezuela's particularly gummy brand of heavy crude.
"There are few refineries in the world that can refine" this crude, Mr. Toro Hardy explained. "Without Citgo, Venezuela's heavy oil would lose value."
Oil analysts also warn that the company will be debilitated for years from the loss of experienced workers. Executives, office workers, engineers and highly trained technicians joined the walkout and, in some cases, damaged computers and software and stole files to hinder reactivation efforts.
Mr. Chávez, who has referred to the employees as traitors and fascists, has promised that they will not be rehired.
But already, oil analysts say, the shortage of experienced workers is being felt in every corner of the company. In the patents and technology department, which develops technology for exploration and refining, 800 were fired. The department that trains executives has lost hundreds, as has the crucial commercialization department, which contracts with oil purchasers.
"Even if you replace the bodies, you don't replace institutional memories," said Larry Goldstein, president of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation, an industry-supported analysis group in New York. "It's a hidden loss. You can't touch it or taste it, but it's there."