Venezuela Oil Production Lowest In 28 Years; Venezuela Exports To US Almost Half What The Bakken Produces -- November 14, 2017

A reader sent me a link to an article reporting that Venezuelan crude oil production has dropped to a 28-year low. It will be interesting to watch Venezuelan crude oil exports to the US over the next few months.

This is a look at Venezuelan crude oil exports to the US, in thousands of bbls per month. In the most recent month in which data was provide, Venezuela exported less than 20 million bbls of heavy oil to the US.

North Dakota is producing over 30 million bbls of light oil on a monthly basis. It looks like the last time Venezuela shipped 30 million bbls of oil to the US in any given month was December, 2012. The last year that Venezuela consisted exported that amount of oil to the US was in 2011. The Bakken was hitting its stride in 2010. The "glory years" for Venezuelan oil production appears to have been just before the Great Recession.

Venezuela says it is producing slightly less than 2 million bopd. North Dakota is producing slightly more than 1 million bopd.

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Notes To The Granddaughters

Our family (wife and two daughters) lived in Germany for a total of about eight years (three different assignments) while I was in the US Air Force.

Among a gazillion memories we have of Germany is "scherenschnitte."

From wiki:

Scherenschnitte, which means "scissor cuts" in German, is the art of paper cutting design. The artwork often has rotational symmetry within the design, and common forms include silhouettes, valentines, and love letters. The art tradition was founded in Switzerland and Germany in the 16th century and was brought to Colonial America in the 18th century by Dutch immigrants who settled primarily in Pennsylvania.

I had not thought of scherenschnitte in a long time but while reading Mindy Johnson's history of the "ink and paint" women of Walt Disney studios, I came across the following on page 60:

One of the earliest women to make a major mark in animation was German-born Charlotte "Lotte" Reiniger, who created the first of her silhouette animations as titles for Paul Wegener's 1916 feature film Rubezahls Hochzeit (Rumpelstiltskin's Wedding).

This form of shadow animation stemmed from the long-established folk tradition of silhouette cutting, or scherenschnitte, an art form primarily demonstrated by women artists in the early 1900s.