Opponent Oneida Guaipe says Maduro is mocking Venezuelans by promising that the country will produce two million barrels of oil a day

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

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

A week ago, Maduro reiterated that this year's oil production target is two million barrels per day of oil, which would represent a 153.8% increase over February's production of 788,000 barrels per day, well short of the one million barrels per day target of the diet of 2021.

In this regard, the former parliamentarian claimed that Maduro “continues to lie to the world and the country” and stressed that to recover Venezuela's oil production “it is urgent to reform the hydrocarbon law.”

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

Several economists and oil experts suspect Venezuelan crude production will reach two million barrels per day, and say the Caribbean country would not have the capacity to cover Russia's oil supply gap as a result of Joe Biden government sanctions, in a scenario in which the United States measures against state-owned PDVSA are more flexible.

(With information from EFE)

Keep reading: