After having spread the idea that Chevron would be prevented from increasing oil production due to the inoperativeness of PDVSA, now the media, without rhyme or reason, announce that the US company is close to increasing extraction to more than 160.000 barrels per day.
Not all media, of course. Well, if they were all so acolytes and submissive, they would surely make life very difficult for the inhabitants of this country and the planet, but not impossible. Fortunately, until now there is no Communication Theory that supports his insatiable desire to achieve the dream of the so-called Hypodermic Needle, the one that the American researcher and publicist Harold Dwight Lasswell proclaimed, who between the First and Second World Wars formulated that the media, with the the minds until inoculating the messages, manage to generate in the masses the behaviors desired by the owners of the media.
For them, Chevron is not the oil company that has been in Venezuela for more than 100 years doing lucrative business with the Devil's Excrement of the Beloved Land of the Sun. Much less does it occur to them to think that he never had ragged and starving workers walking through the dusty and parched corridors of Office Number One.
For them, Chevron is not a transnational oil company associated with PDVSA with percentages of less than 50% in the Petroindependiente mixed companies, in which it holds 25,2% of the share package, Petroboscan 39,2%, Petropiar 30% and Petroindependencia 34%. .
For them, she acts and produces alone. It doesn't even go through the newsroom that because of the sanctions of the government of their country, the United States, applied to Venezuela, they abandoned their responsibility to produce the share that corresponds to them in these joint ventures, and left them all that car, as we say in Venezuelan, to PDVSA.
Nothing to see. Launched in their task of winning smiles and "green" sympathies from the US Government, the first Agenda Setting adopted by these media was and continues to be trying to stupefy the human mass so that they reply like a parrot that Chevron has come to do us a favor, with great sacrifice, to raise production. Such good people her.
Once the company had been identified with the humanitarian and ethical vocation of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and the charitable spirit of Viridiana de Luis Buñuel, the next step was to try to make it clear to public opinion that this oil orphanage could not do its charitable work well because of the operational ineptitude of PDVSA.
"Crisis in Venezuela: Chavismo cannot pay for the dredging of Lake Maracaibo and is stopping the oil plans," said, just a week ago, the Argentine media outlet Infobae, always more concerned about Venezuela than about the Dead Cow of the gaucho lands.
The newspaper that began its current and inclined decline in the sixties, El Nacional, because of the sanctions and blockade imposed by British Intelligence and the National Association of Advertisers, ANDA, because its "communist" director, Miguel Otero Silva, supported the Cuban revolution, headlined: "Bloomberg: Chevron's plans are halted due to the impossibility of Venezuela paying for dredging."
Also the medium that has in its Manual of Style the unscathed and sacred principle of never affecting the interests of the United States, the Voice of America, was more daring and said: "Chevron's production increase in Venezuela is limited by political risk." Something like whether or not to increase production depends on whether or not President Maduro wins the elections in 2024.
It's more. True to the source, the Voice of America noted the words of the Chevron president, in which he expressed that Chevron's production in Venezuela could remain modest and one factor is the result of future elections. I would expect us to go slow,” he added during the company's annual investor day. "It's a little bit higher than that (90.000 bpd) probably today."
Well, the paradox is that "the slow progress of modest production", as if the desire for profit did not defy the speed of light, is that after having produced some 40.000 barrels per day at the end of 2022, last week Reuters announced that "In the second stage Chevron expects to increase oil production to 160.000 barrels per day this year and by 2024 to increase it to 200.000." In other words, the modest figure of 500% will increase extraction.
The reason for such an almost desperate advance is partly explained by the oil analyst and professor at the Central University of Venezuela, UCV, Carlos Mendoza Potellá. He points out that in reality, and according to not very recent data but kept in a low corporate profile, only in the field is Boscán Chevron standing on one of the giants that Venezuela has and this is how the Association of Geologists of the United States, AAPG, registers it. :
“The Boscán Field is a giant heavy oil field located on land 45 km South West of Maracaibo, Venezuela. … The original oil volume in place is estimated to be between 25 and 35 billion barrels of oil, cumulative production is 1,2 billion barrels of oil.”
In other words, says Potellá, "since its discovery, in 76 years, between 3,4 and 4,8 percent of the oil originally in situ has barely been produced."
“And Chevron…?” exclaims Potellá. "Salivating like Pavlov's dog in the face of prospects that he knows and knows are very promising and lobbying between Washington and Caracas."
That's where the media go. With the fans on and always keeping in mind the informational political line that any increase in oil production is thanks to Chevron, any drop in oil production is the responsibility of PDVSA's ineptitude.
