La Apertura
- Mike
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 9 hours ago
A Brief Overview of Venezuela's Amazing Oil History
As 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 thru, non-stop, suffocating clouds of mosquitoes.
So abundant was the gooey. oily stuff it was put in wooden casks and stored aboard ship as the Spanish sailed on, exploring the eastern shore of the Gulf of Mexico and Spanish settlements in Veracruz and Tampico in what would later be known as Mexico.
After the discovery of Spindletop in Texas in 1901, commercial oil exploration (using cable tool rigs) started hammering away at places where oil seeped out the ground, anywhere, and massive discoveries were made in Mexico's Golden Lane and eventually along the eastern shore of Lake Maracaibo.
In 1914 an American based company called Caribbean Petroleum Company found very small, shallow Eocene aged oil in Mene Grande Field. Mene Grande still produces oil today from a wide range of correlative depths.
La Apertura, the "opening," in Spanish, of the great Venezuelan oil industry, however, occurred in December 1922 with the Barroso No. 2 well drilled near Cabimas, the first significant oil found in the country, indeed ALL of South America.
The Barroso well(s) was drilled by the Venezuelan Oil Concessions Company (VOC), an actual subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell. Its No. 1 well was located seven miles north of the No. 2 and was a dry hole. The No. 2 well was spudded soon after using a standard derrick but with draw works and boilers hauled across the countryside with mules.
At 1,613 feet the No. 2 bottom hole assembly because stuck in hard lignite, thought to be cap rock as some oil shows oozed to the surface while trying to pull the bit. The well was abandoned for five months while mechanical jars from America were shipped to the well site. Once the BHA was jarred lose, everything in the hole blew out sending a column of thick oil over 150 feet into the air.
The surrounding jungle was cleared with mules and horses and pits were dug to capture the oil, gauged then to be near 2,000 BOPD.
Every day the well increased its critical flow rates up the only string of set casing and by day eight production into earthen pits was placed at 100,000 BOPD.
The oil was black, viscous 18 gravity goo but there was a bunch of it and earthen pits were pumped to storage tanks.
Some boys from Texas were shuffled down to Venezuela and on day 10 they were able to stab a valve over the casing, anchor everything down and get the well on some reasonable form of diverter system.
The subsequent development around El Barroso No. 2 was quite large and the field was named, La Rosa.
Over the ensuing two years America and English companies found more Eocene oil along the eastern side of the lake in places like Bachaquero, Tia Juana and Languillas Fields, massive amounts of oil at various depths. whose gravities ranged from 11 degrees to 34 degrees.
Eventually by 1939, with the rumblings of World War II in the wind, Venezuela became the single most important crude oil exporter to Allied Forces in Europe. By the early 1950's Venezuela as the largest crude oil exporter in the world.
Right, over 700 acres of jungle eventually died from oil flow from the blowout and had to be clear cut, by hand, and burned.
El Barroso Numero Dos produced an estimated 900,000 barrels of oil before dying from loss of bottom hole pressure. The well was plugged and sealed up in 1932.
A home was eventually built directly over the old abandoned well years later and soon an entire neighborhood appeared in the area.
In 1970 a professor of Venezuelan oil history
named, Orlando Mendez did various surveying in the neighborhood in an attempt to locate the abandoned well and did, under a bathroom of a home for a family of seven. The floor was ripped up and low and behold, there lay the great, Barroso No. Two well.
To honor the well, and the discovery that essentially changed Venezuela forever, the home and the entire neighborhood was bought by the government in Caracas and destroyed.
A stunningly beautiful plaza was created, and fountain was built just a few feet from the actual well bore. It still stands today, though sadly, the fountain no longer works, symbolic, if you will, of Venezuela's current situation.
La Plaza El Barroso, Cabimas.
Venezuelan oilfield workers, Cabimas, La Rosa Field; 1927. Courtesy the University of Louisville.
Exxon, Mobil and Conoco were active in developing many oil fields in Venezuela until 1976 when the country's president, Carlos Parez, nationalized its oil industry and created the country's primary IOC, Petroleos de Venezuela, or PDVSA.
Parez struggled managing his country's oil resources and by 1991 he invited Exxon and Conoco back into the country where it operated large fields under heavy royalty burdens paid to the government over the next decade.
In 1998 Hugo Chavez was elected as Venezuela's President and he began a campaign of debt and corresponding CAPEX expenditures that proved financially disastrous for his country's oil wealth. He expropriated Exxon and Conoco out of Venezuela, once again, in 2007 and from that point forward the oil industry in Venezuela crumbled. The U.S. State Department, angry at Exxon getting the boot, found vast corruption within PDVSA. Many American service companies, like Halliburton and Schlumberger were never paid by PDVSA and Exxon, nor Conoco, ever recovered its assets.
It was Obama that first implemented sanctions against the country of Venezuela in 2015 and Trump simply re-enforced them during his tenure; both administrations believing they held some form of 'moral high ground' over this small, South American country. Harold Hamm was paramount in Trump's sanctions in 2017 believing Venezuela was 'dumping' crude oil on the world market, below its costs, to cause his expensive shale oil in the Bakken to be unprofitable. He lobbied Trump hard for oil sanctions, all to better his personal finances. Trump obliged.
Today, 2025, with Trump back in office, additional sanctions are being imposed on Venezuelan oil and its current president, Maduro. When Trump claims he is simply "taking back" what belongs to the U.S. anyway he is referring to Exxon and Conoco oil assets that were expropriated in 2007. The U.S., of course, discovered most of the world's oil reserves over the past 100 years and was always, ultimately, got run completely out of the countries in which they operated, uncompensated; Saudi Arabia and Mexico, for instance. Venezuela is no different.
I have been to Venezuela numerous times and my love for the country, its culture, and its people prevents me from lamenting about its problems, it's clear communist leaning politics, the demise of its great oil industry, and the environmental blight of Lake Maracaibo. It only brings me sadness to think I may never see the country again. The Lake will never recover.
Lord, Boots & Coots went on some massive blowouts in Venezuela, wow. Boots performed the first sub-sea, or sub-lake capping of a blowing well in Maracaibo in the late 1980's that was nothing short of an engineering marvel. Pat Campbell, then with Boots and Coots, would later use a lot of Boots know- how when Wild Well Control capped the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, in 5,000 feet of water. B&C entered into a significant contract with PDVSA to plug pressured wells in the Orinoco Delta in 1994-1995 and pretty much as soon as Chavez entered the picture we were gone. We carried tens of millions in K&R insurance when working in Venezuela and Columbia. It was never very reassuring.
I never knew a Venezuelan that felt safe voting in any form of make-believe, democratic election process; they only wanted to work, care for family and be happy. They are terrified to have to vote and are told how, when and for whom. Americans have a distorted, twisted view of Venezuela that is far from the actual truth.
I stayed in touch with a PE friend there until 2007; his brother and his family had taken to eating house cats and throwing big cast nets over flamingoes in ponds for food. It was that bad. After 2008 I never heard from him again. I fear the worse. There is a criminal element outside the government criminals that the government leaves alone out of fear.
We, B&C, carried tens of millions in K&R insurance when working in Venezuela and Columbia. It was never very reassuring. We went anyway and did what we were hired to do.
I think most of the drug problem is coming from Columbia and trafficked thru Venezuela. That has to stop, of course, and Maduro has to go, like... manana. The population of the country will not be able to do that, I do not believe.
The country's once powerful oil sector has to be restored to its former glory for the sake of its people, and for the Western Hemisphere. It's drilling engineers and production people are smart and have the capability themselves if only the corruption would stop.
"Relámpago del Catatumbo"
The southeastern portion of Lake Maracaibo is often called the lightening capital of the world. In the rainy season enormous thunderstorms develop over cooler water and clash with warm land updrafts that cause spectacular lightning storms that light up the entire sky for hours at a time. It is breathtaking to see.