Upgrade U – Upgrader Repairs Could Offer Surest Route to Higher Venezuelan Crude Oil Production

There’s no shortage of work to be done to revive Venezuela’s crude oil industry, much of which suffered from years of poor management and minimal investment. One rehabilitation effort that may well provide a lot of bang for the buck would be to repair and restart the industry’s crude upgraders, which process Venezuela’s extra-heavy oil to produce a lighter synthetic crude that can then be piped, shipped and refined. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll discuss how improving the upgraders could make a massive difference for U.S. Gulf Coast refiners.

We’ve written extensively this year about Venezuela’s oil sector in the wake of the U.S.-backed removal of President Nicolás Maduro, starting with Take Me Money and Run Venezuela, where we recapped how the country went from supplying more than 1 MMb/d of heavy sour crude to Gulf Coast refiners in the late 1990s and early 2000s to overall production of less than 1 MMb/d today — roughly one-quarter of its former output. We then dug into the unique characteristics of Venezuela’s crude slate in Orinoco Flow, noting that most reserves lie in the 21,000-square-mile Orinoco Belt and are extra-heavy (API as low as 8-14 degrees), making the oil difficult and costly to move and refine. In When Love Comes to Town, we compared Venezuelan and Canadian heavy crudes. Finally, in Round and Round (which previewed our first Drill Down Report of 2026, which is available here), we laid out the practical steps Venezuela would need to take to boost crude production.

This is the second in our new series on Venezuela. The first piece focused on the refining sector, which is so far gone that we see little interest from Western companies in making the large investments needed to restore it, especially given the growing surplus of refined products from the Gulf Coast. (Check out our biannual Future of Fuels report, where we discuss this in more detail.)

But the situation with Venezuela’s crude upgraders is quite different from the country’s refiners (black pentagons in Figure 1 below). While the country’s four upgraders (white pentagons along the coast) are also dilapidated after years of underinvestment and barely operable — if at all — they are critical to increasing production from the Orinoco Belt (blue-shaded area). The extra-heavy crude produced there must be either upgraded into synthetic crude oil (SCO) or blended with a diluent like condensate or natural gasoline before it can be exported. Given that the vast majority of the diluent used in Venezuela needs to be imported, the lack of operable upgrading capacity is a major constraint on crude production.