Venezuela's crumbling oil infrastructure makes it top polluter

President Donald Trump wants the U.S. oil and gas industry to ramp up operations in Venezuela. But earlier this month, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods called the country’s oil infrastructure “uninvestible.”

Much of Venezuela’s oil and gas infrastructure has fallen into disrepair, meaning there would be a major climate cost if U.S. firms became more involved there.

Methane is a powerful climate-warming gas, and Harvard University climate scientist James East said the oil and gas industry in Venezuela emits a lot of it.

“Venezuela is the number one highest emitting country in terms of this intensity,” East said.

Using satellite measurements, East found 29% of methane produced in Venezuela may be escaping into the atmosphere. In the U.S., that number is just two percent.

“It’s being wasted,” he said. “It’s not going to market, but it is going into the atmosphere where it influences the climate.”

Broken pipes and pumps are some of the main culprits, said Rocky Mountain Institute senior principal and former chemical engineer Debbie Gordon.

“It’s basically the result of a system that’s not being overseen properly,” Gordon said. “There aren’t workers necessarily there. They’re not fixing things.”

Even if U.S. firms were to invest billions to plug those methane leaks, Gordon said, producing Venezuelan oil uses about twice the amount of energy as oil from Saudi Arabia, for instance.

“The majority of Venezuelan oil is very sludgy — thick, high-sulfur, heavy,” she said. “You have to do heroic efforts to get it out of the ground. It doesn’t want to move.”

Gordon said reviving the country’s oil and gas industry is not just an economic conundrum, but also an environmental one.