The Biden administration reportedly has recently been engaged in secret negotiations with Venezuelan President (and Vladimir Putin ally) Nicolás Maduro. The essence of the stories is that President Joe Biden would like to import Venezuelan crude oil again.
Venezuela used to be a major source for U.S. oil imports, but those purchases came to an end as the United States ratcheted up economic sanctions on the Venezuelan dictator and serial human rights abuser.
Now that the United States has imposed economic sanctions on Putin, Biden is scrambling to find some additional oil imports to replace those we can no longer buy from Russia.
Here’s the irony—and tragedy—behind Biden’s dictator diplomacy. On his first day in the Oval Office, Biden issued an executive order canceling the Keystone XL pipeline—fulfilling a campaign pledge he made to progressives and environmentalists who supported him.
The Keystone XL pipeline was part of the larger Keystone pipeline system, which has been transporting Canadian tar sands oil to U.S. refineries for more than a decade.
The Keystone XL would have been an additional pipeline taking a slightly different route. It would have transported an estimated 800,000 barrels a day of Canadian oil to U.S. oil refineries on the Gulf Coast, which are able to refine that type of heavy crude.
How many barrels of oil per day was the United States buying from Venezuela before sanctions kicked in? About 800,000.
As the table shows, the U.S. imported 741,000 barrels of crude oil per day from Venezuela in 2016, a figure that gradually declined as sanctions grew. But also notice that as Venezuelan crude oil imports declined, Russian crude oil imports increased.
So, to make this clear: Biden canceled the Keystone XL, which would have supplied the U.S. with roughly the same amount of Canadian oil we had been importing from Venezuela. Those imports were partially made up by Russia.
Biden can’t go back to the Keystone XL. The company building the pipeline finally gave up. It had been a liberal hot potato for a decade. First it was on, then it was off, then it was on and then it was off. At some point a company just moves on.
Having angered and economically stiffed our Canadian allies, Biden now has to suck up to a Marxist dictator and human rights abuser in the hope of buying Venezuelan oil from a country that seized and nationalized oil company assets and jailed oil company executives.
It’s yet another embarrassing moment for an administration that has raised political embarrassment to a new level.
March 29, 2022