sorry for the newb question but -- I thought that Venezuela now has more known oil in the ground than Saudi Arabia, and OPEC broke at a certain point due to producer rivalries ? corrections welcome for 2025
From day 1 OPEC has been a loose association off frenemies that occasionally manage to work together for a while when enough of them are sufficiently hurting/greedy at the same time. They break due to producer rivalries every few years.
Oil in the ground is marginally more valuable than pie in the sky. There is nearly unlimited oil in the ground, but you have to find it, extract it, and show a profit after you subtract your expenses. Each step is harder than the last. Saudi oil is like $10 a barrel to produce. You can practically dig it up with a shovel. And it's high quality...a benchmark grade that a lot of the world's refineries are set up for. Much of Venezuelas oil is deep underwater and/or garbage quality. Think huge expensive deep water oil rigs and pumping high pressure kerosene into the ground to loosen up the tar/oil sands enough to get a nasty chunky sandy sludge out of the ground that a lot of refineries can't even process. And it doesn't help that they're under sanctions and don't domestically produce a lot of the equipment they need to extract their oil. And rampant corruption. Venezuela's massive reserves have equally massive challenges turning into profitable oil production.
Venezuela definitely has an absolutely massive amount of oil in the ground still. I'm not sure about trusted proven reserve numbers and relative rankings, but its definitely up there.
However, Venezuela's oil is a good bit harder to refine than Saudi oil which is just about the simplest oil to refine. The US controls most of the good refineries (and related technologies) to effectively refine Venezuela's oil, but the US doesn't tend to trade much with Venezuela (lots of history to read there).
So yes, Venezuela has a lot of oil, but it is oil most of the world's refineries don't want to/can't deal with.
As a note, this is also a part of the reason why even though the US is a net exporter of oil we still import a ton of oil. We've got good refineries for processing the cheap difficult to handle stuff most of the world doesn't want to touch (largely because we built it designed to handle Venezuela's oil) and we export stuff that's the "fancy" stuff easy to refine pretty much everywhere.
There's a lot of nuance I'm glazing over there. Read up more about the history of US-Venezuela oil trade, it is quite a history.
