The oil industry in Venezuela is broken. Now it’s breaking the environment.
Every morning, José Aguilera inspects the leaves of his banana and coffee plants on his farm in eastern Venezuela and calculates how much he can harvest – next to nothing.
Explosive gas flares from nearby oil wells spew an oily, flammable residue on the plants. The leaves burn, wither and wither.
“There is no poison that can fight the oil,” he said. “When it falls, everything dries up.”
Venezuela’s oil industry, which has helped transform the country, has been decimated by mismanagement and years of US sanctions imposed on the country’s authoritarian government, leaving behind a stricken economy and a devastated environment.
The state oil company is struggling to maintain minimum production for export to other countries and for domestic consumption. But to do so has sacrificed basic maintenance and relied on increasingly shoddy equipment that has led to a growing toll on the environment, environmentalists say.
Mr. Aguilera lives in El Tejero, a city nearly 500 kilometers east of Caracas, the capital, in an oil-rich region known for its cities that never see the darkness of night. Gas flares from oil wells light up every hour with a roar of thunder, their tremors cracking the walls of rickety houses.
Many residents complain of respiratory illnesses such as asthma, which scientists say could be exacerbated by gas flare emissions. Rain brings down an oily film that tarnishes car engines, darkens white clothing and stains notebooks children carry to school.
And yet, paradoxically, widespread fuel shortages in the country with the world’s largest proven oil reserves mean that virtually no one in this region has cooking gas at home.
Shortly after President Hugo Chávez came to power in the 1990s with promises to use the country’s oil wealth to uplift the poor, he fired thousands of oil workers, including engineers and geologists, and replaced them with political supporters, took control of foreign-owned oil assets, and flouted safety and environmental standards.
Then, in 2019, the United States accused Mr. Chavez, President Nicolás Maduro of electoral fraud and imposed economic sanctions, including a ban on Venezuelan oil imports, to try to force him out of power.
The country’s economy collapsed, contributing to a mass exodus of Venezuelans who could not afford to feed their families, even as Maduro has managed to maintain his repressive grip on power.
After nearly stalling, the oil sector has made a modest recovery, in part because last year the Biden administration allowed Chevron, the last US company to produce oil in Venezuela, to resume operations on a limited basis.
The national oil industry’s problems have been exacerbated by a corruption investigation into missing oil money that has so far led to dozens of arrests and the resignation of the country’s oil minister.
In eastern Venezuela, rusting refineries burn methane gas that is part of the operations of the fossil fuel industry and a major driver of global warming.
Although Venezuela produces far less oil than it once did, it ranks third in the world in terms of methane emissions per barrel of oil produced, according to the International Energy Agency.
Cabimas, a town about 400 miles northwest of Caracas on the shores of Lake Maracaibo, is another center of regional oil production. There, state oil company PDVSA built hospitals and schools, set up summer camps and provided residents with Christmas toys.
Now oil is seeping into the lake from deteriorating underwater pipelines, covering the banks and turning the water neon green can be seen from space. Broken pipes float on the surface and oil drills rust and sink in the water. Oil-covered birds have trouble flying.
The collapse of the oil industry has left Cabimas, once one of the wealthiest communities in Venezuela, living in extreme poverty.
Every day at 5 a.m., the three Méndez brothers — Miguel, 16, Diego, 14, and Manuel, 13 — untangle their fishing nets, clean them, and row into the polluted waters of Lake Maracaibo, hoping to catch enough shrimp and fish to feed themselves, their parents, and their younger sister.
They use gasoline to wash the oil off their skin.
Children play and bathe in the water, which smells of rotting marine life.
The boys’ father, Nelson Méndez, 58, was once a commercial fisherman, when the lake was cleaner. He’s worried about getting sick from eating what his kids catch, but he’s more worried about starvation.
He said he was hired by the state oil company about 10 years ago to help clean up a fuel spill in the lake, but the work damaged his eyesight.
“Everything I’ve worked for in life, I’ve lost because of the oil,” said Mr. Méndez.
Poor maintenance of fuel production machinery in Lake Maracaibo has led to an increase in oil spills, according to local organizations, which have contaminated Cabimas and other communities along the shoreline.
The gas flares burning in parts of Venezuela also point to the weakening of the country’s fossil fuel industry: So much gas is entering the atmosphere because there isn’t enough working equipment to convert it into fuel, experts say.
Venezuela belongs to the worst countries in the world in terms of the volume of gas flares produced by its decrepit fuel operations, according to the World Bank.
In a 2021 reportthe United Nations Commission on Human Rights expressed deep concern about the state of the Venezuelan oil industry.
“It is imperative that the government effectively implement its environmental regulatory framework for the oil industry,” the report said.
At a UN summit on climate change last year, Maduro did not talk about the environmental damage caused by his country’s viscous oil industry.
Instead, he claimed Venezuela was responsible for less than 0.4 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and blamed wealthier countries for causing environmental damage. (Experts say this figure is accurate, noting that the country’s emissions have declined as the oil industry has collapsed.)
“The Venezuelan people must pay for the consequences of an imbalance caused by the world’s leading capitalist economies,” Maduro said in a speech at the summit.
A top government minister, Josué Alejandro Lorca, said in 2021 that oil spills “weren’t a problem because historically all oil companies have had them.” He added that the government lacked the resources to deal with the problem.
The state oil company did not respond to requests for comment.
In Cabimas, 46-year-old David Colina, a fisherman, wears oil-stained orange overalls with the state oil company’s signature emblem.
Thirty years ago, he said, he could catch more than 200 pounds of fish. Now he’s lucky if he picks up 25 pounds in his net before exchanging them for flour or rice from his neighbours.
When the state oil company functioned better, Mr Colina said, he would be compensated if an oil spill hurt his fishing business. But now, he added, “there is no government here anymore.”
After Chevron announced last year it would resume some oil production in Venezuela, the state oil company hired divers to inspect oil pipelines in Lake Maracaibo.
According to interviews with three of those divers, leaking pipelines have yet to be repaired. The divers spoke anonymously, saying they could be punished for revealing internal company information. A Chevron representative declined to comment and referred questions to the Venezuelan state oil company.
Francisco Barrios, 62, who also lives in Cabimas, repaired boats used by the oil industry for more than 20 years and earned enough to feed his five children and pay for their education.
But he was becoming disillusioned, he said, with the industry’s decline, the pollution it created, increasingly shoddy infrastructure and a paycheck that couldn’t keep up with the rising cost of living.
He said one of his sons, who was a diver, was killed 12 years ago when an underwater pipe he was repairing exploded.
“I grew tired of seeing the destruction,” he said as he used gasoline to remove oil that had seeped into his garden.
Genevieve Glatsky contributing reporting from Bogotá, Colombia, and Ronny Rodríguez from El Tejero, Venezuela.