By Charles Kennedy – Oct 16, 2024, 4:00 AM CDT
A fire at an oil tank in Venezuela has left 21 people injured, including firefighters, terminal workers, and local residents, Reuters reported.
The fire broke out on Tuesday after a storm and burned late into the night, the report said. The location was the La Salinas oil terminal, a property of state-owned PDVSA, which the company uses to transport crude oil between local ports.
There were 75,000 barrels of oil at the facility when the fire broke out.
“Many people were exposed to high temperatures. We have counted 21 injured so far, all of them with minor lesions,” a local fire brigade chief told Reuters, adding that the number of the injured could rise.
Venezuela’s oil industry has been battered by U.S. sanctions and years of underinvestment but has survived and production recently even increased, as the U.S. allowed some companies to return to the country and resume operations with PDVSA amid a shortage of heavy crude following the imposition of sanctions on Russian oil.
Despite these moves by the U.S., Washington still remains at odds with Venezuela’s leadership and there is little chance that sanctions would be lifted anytime soon, especially after Nicolas Maduro won yet another term in office in elections that the Venezuelan opposition said were manipulated.
Meanwhile, Venezuela’s oil production is growing steadily. This year, average daily production has gone up from about 750,000 bpd to over 800,000 bpd, with the quarterly average rising from 816,000 bpd in the first quarter, to 838,000 bpd in the second quarter, and 871,000 bpd in the third quarter, according to the latest secondary-source data from OPEC. According to Venezuelan state sources, production is even higher, exceeding 900,000 bpd earlier in the year. This is a far cry from Venezuela’s oil production in the past: in 2000, the country pumped some 3.2 million barrels daily.
By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com
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