Heavy Duty

What country has the world's largest oil reserves? Saudi? Iraq? Russia? Nope, nope, and nope.

Actually, it kind of depends on what you mean by "oil." Up until now, that noun referred primarily to the light, sweet crude that comes bubbling up out of the ground with very little effort when you tap into it. The really heavy, ugly, tarry stuff didn't count. Who wanted it?

Now all that has changed. The last great hoard of untapped light sweet is Iraq, and Iraqi oil production is kind of, umm...out of comission right now. Saudi Arabia is running out of the stuff, and although the super-secret Saudi government has kept the lid on information about its real reserves, it's known to be pumping huge amounts of sea water into the Ghawar field, the largest ever, to extract what's left.

Iran, Russia, the U.S., Nigeria, the British North Sea, all are well past their production peaks.

That means the future belongs to heavy oil, which has to be forced out of the ground via an expensive process that involves injecting steam into the wells. What comes out isn't oil, but a dirty goo -- you could almost call it oil "ore" -- which then must be pressure cooked. More expense, but at the end you finally do get oil, which can be refined into gasoline and pumped into American vehicles, so American drivers can continue commuting from Park View Lake or Lake View Park or View Park Lake or Lake Park View to downtown Shitapolis or wherever, and drive to Wal-Mart to buy more Chinese tchotkes or taxi the kids to soccer practice on the weekend. But at a much higher price. But we knew that.

So don't panic. The news is we can continue with our prodigal, ugly, wasteful way of life, based on automobiles and oil and the construction of new, beige subdivisions and strip malls, which is, incidentally, monkeywrenching the global climate and poisoning our dear mother earth. But why dwell on it? Let's have a party.

So, from the top, what country has the world's largest oil reserves? Canada has really big ones in the Alberta tar sands, but by far the biggest are in Venezuela.

The winner is...Hugo Chavez!

And he knows it. And on June 1 when he hosts the opening of this year's OPEC conference, he plans to demand that the cartel officially recognize a quadrupling of Venezuela's reserve capacity, from 77 billion to 312 billion barrels, which would make Venezuela the lead OPEC country, and make Chavez the most powerful head of government in the world.

"Nonsense" says Nawaf Obaid, a Saudi national security adviser. "Harumph harumph," say American oil company executives. But Chavez's contention is backed up by documentation from the the Bush administration's own Energy Information Agency (EIA).

I guess there is some justice in the world. How ironic that American foreign policy, which for the last 60 years has been driven by obsession with the middle east and middle eastern oil, and has come to grief in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine, should now find itself blind-sided by a guy who wants to do away with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and replace them with his own kinder, gentler, more socialistic lending agency.

I don't want to get into an appraisal of Chavez here. I have mixed feelings about him, and I think it's always dangerous when one person gains as much power as he has, even if that person is St. Francis.

If you want to find out more about Chavez, I'd suggest Alma Guillermoprieto's two-part profile of him that ran in the New York Review of Books in October of last year. It's available on line, but no, I'm not going to look up the link for you. Look it up yourself. I guarantee you, if you read all of both those articles, you'll end up knowing more about Chavez than you wanted to know. Wouldn't hurt, though, since he's going to be the most powerful person on earth before too long.

But will the world be better off when the most powerful person in it is Hugo Chavez rather than George W. Bush? No doubt about it.

Resources: "Heavy Hitter: The End of Cheap Oil and the Rise of the House of Chavez," by Greg Palast in Harper's magazine, June, 2006, pages 66 and 67.

"Don't Cry for Me, Venezuela," by Alma Guillermoprieto in the New York Review of Books, October 6, 2005 (Part 1 of a 2-part profile of Chavez, available on line).

"The Gambler," by Alma Guillermoprieto in the the New York Review of Books, October 20, 2005 (Part 2 of a 2-part profile of Chavez, available on line).