I worked in Venezuela some when I was with B&C in the mid-1990's; we had a yard in Maturin with some high-pressure pumps, an Athey boom and some other stuff. Venezuela is more than heavy oil extraction at 3,000-6,000 feet; there are some deeper, high-pressured surprises that were always kicking peoples butts down there. In fact, we eventually opened an office in Maturin and some of the last contractual work we did for PDVSA was plugging pressured wells out in delta marsh, where the anacondas were 12 feet long and had heads on them as big as footballs. Those wells were deep in the jungle and though pinned with GPS, were never where they were supposed to be and finding them took days of chainsaw work to get the barges up to the wells.

A fairly small loss of surface control, above, that led to losing an expensive drilling rig.

I am staying out of the politics of all this, the best I can, that has recently happened save to say that everybody I know from Venezuela is joyful at the moment. The last time I was there was to peacock bass fish, in the Orinoco, and people were starving then. My buddy wandered off when we visited the Palace in Caracas and when I found him, he was surrounded about ready to never be seen again.

www.oilystuff.com

A Brief Overview of Venezuela's Amazing Oil HistoryAs early as the 15th century the Spanish found shallow water passage from the Gulf of Venezuela, south into a large freshwater lake they eventually named, Maracaibo. Along the eastern shore of the lake massive seeps of heavy tar were found along riverbeds and simply bubbling up in shallow water near the shoreline. This thick gooey stuff could be used to chalk wooden ships, treat livestock and was diluted and used to lessen the suffering men went

I want the very best for the people of Venezuela, period, and if some day some of Lake Maracaibo can be cleaned up and de-toxified, I am all for THAT! It's a blight on my industry, whomever was in charge, the Lake, and absolutely awful.

The heavy oil belt, called the Faja, or lane, is north of the river and quite extensive. As you can see in this recent map there are a lot of foreign countries with concessions along the belt that are not going to be happy about getting kicked out. The oil in the belt is as thick as syrup (8 API) and make tons of unconsolidated sand along with the oil; you can try and control the sand downhole or move it up hole and deal with it there. The oil is heavier than 8.6 pound per gallon water and oil water contacts are often inverted in thick sand bodies.

The rigs seen in Venezuela are big because they are required to have big hook load capacities for big casing strings and most of the heavy oil wells are now short HZ laterals of 3,ooo to 8,000 feet long. They cold produce this stuff, using diluents, to reduce surface tension and increase mobility...many good heavy oil wells in the Faja make 1000 BOPD. Amazing given how thick they stuff is.

I produced lots and lots of 20 API oil in South Texas and used a lot of sand control techniques developed in Venezuela, like expandable open hole screens, etc., and experimented a lot with Venezuelan polymers for dewatering. Many of my wells were on PCP lift systems.

www.rigzone.com

Heavy oil is a type of crude oil that is viscous, meaning that it is thick and does not flow easily.