Non-affiliation notice: Independent company. No affiliation with President Donald J. Trump, the Trump family, the Trump Organization, the U.S. government, or the Venezuelan government.
Mochima National ParkCrude Reference
Venezuelan crude is not one product. This page explains the grades that are actually traded, what makes them heavy, and why the same barrel is valuable to one refinery and unusable at another.
Grades
Names such as Merey describe export specifications, not single reservoirs. What sits behind the name changes with the blend that is available.
Heavy blended export grade
The best-known Venezuelan export blend, produced by cutting extra-heavy Orinoco crude with lighter domestic crude or imported diluent. It is a blend specification rather than a single reservoir stream, so its properties depend on what is available to blend with at the time.
Heavy, high-sulphur
A dense, viscous western Venezuelan crude historically valued by asphalt producers and by refiners with the coking and desulphurisation capacity to handle it.
Lighter eastern grades
Lighter, sweeter eastern streams. Their practical importance is often as blendstock: lighter domestic crude is one of the ways extra-heavy production is brought to a pipeline-and-tanker specification.
Diluent-cut extra-heavy
Extra-heavy crude mixed with naphtha or another diluent purely so it can flow. The diluent is a cost and a logistics dependency, and in some configurations it is recovered and recycled rather than sold with the barrel.
Product of an upgrader
Where an upgrader exists, extra-heavy feed is partially converted into a lighter, lower-sulphur synthetic crude that a much wider set of refineries can process. Upgrading is capital intensive and is the main reason Orinoco projects have historically been multi-billion-dollar undertakings.
Properties
Five properties do most of the work in deciding whether a refinery can run Venezuelan crude and what it will pay for it.
Status
Nothing. This page is reference material published by a development-stage concept.
The proposed entity holds no crude allocation, no grade nomination, no offtake agreement, no marketing rights, no reserves and no production. No grade described here is offered, traded or controlled by it, and no pricing, differential or volume is published because none exists.