Opponent Oneida Guaipe said Maduro mocks Venezuelans by promising that the country will produce two million barrels of oil a day

Opponent Oneida Guaipe said Wednesday that Venezuela's dictator Nicolás Maduro is “mocking” Venezuelans by promising that the country will produce two million barrels per day (bpd) of oil by the end of this year 2022.

“After destroying Pdvsa, a company that competed with the best oil companies in the world, which produced almost 3 million barrels of oil a day, (...) today turned by them into scrap metal (...), it offers the production of two million barrels of oil a day, mocking Venezuelans, who do not even guarantee the gasoline,” said Guaipe, quoted in a press release.

A week ago, Maduro reiterated that the oil production target for this year is two million bpd of oil, which would represent an increase of 153.8% compared to February's output, which was 788,000 bpd, a far cry even from the 2021 regime's target of one million bpd.

In this regard, the former parliamentarian asserted that Maduro “continues to lie to the world and to the country” and pointed out that in order to recover Venezuela's oil production “there is an immediate need to reform the Hydrocarbons Law.”

In June 2019, several deputies of the then National Assembly (AN, Parliament), with an opposition majority, presented the draft of a new hydrocarbons law that provides for the participation of companies with exclusive private capital in the exploitation of crude oil, an activity hitherto reserved for the State.

Several economists and oil experts are suspicious that Venezuelan crude production will reach two million barrels a day, and argue that the Caribbean country would not have the capacity to cover Russia's oil supply deficit following sanctions by the Joe Biden government, in a scenario in which the US make measures against state-owned PDVSA more flexible.

(With information from EFE)

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