HOUSTON, Feb. 21 (UPI) -- Citgo Petroleum Corp. has the sometimes tough job of selling Venezuelan oil in the United States while the two nations' leaders accuse each other of being a threat to the world.
Felix Rodriguez, president and chief executive officer of Citgo, says his focus is purely on business.
"Venezuela is very committed to supplying the United States," Rodriguez told United Press International at a global energy conference in Houston. "This is our commitment."
Rodriguez' comments at the Cambridge Energy Research Associates CERA Week conference come a month after Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced the state would have greater control over certain industries, including oil, and U.S. officials said they would look to reduce dependence on foreign oil, especially from Venezuela.
Venezuela pumped about 2.8 million barrels per day in 2005, the world's 10-largest producer, according to the Energy Information Administration, the data arm of the U.S. Energy Department. It exported about 2.2 million bpd, the eighth-largest supplier to the world and the fourth-largest to the United States behind Canada, Mexico and Saudi Arabia.
Venezuela's oil sector isn't completely nationalized -- in fact, the only oil sector in Latin America to be wholly state-owned is Mexico's -- though Caracas limits most foreign ownership in projects to minority stakes.
Chavez said that by May 1 four joint ventures in the Orinoco Oil Belt, producing about 600,000 bpd of synthetic oil, will be renegotiated so the state owns at least 60 percent (or seized if no deal is reached, Venezuelan Oil and Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez told reporters earlier this month). The joint ventures are between state-owned PDVSA, which also owns Citgo, and majors like BP, Shell, Chevron and Exxon Mobil, among others.
Rodriguez said the move is to keep the deals in line with a new state-heavy hydrocarbon law and took issue when it was dubbed "nationalism" in a somewhat pro-market session at CERA Week.
"The name is not nationalista (nationalism)," Rodriguez said after the session, "it is socialista (socialism)."
PDVSA bought a 50 percent stake in Houston-based Citgo in 1986 and the rest four years later. Citgo sold nearly 14 billion gallons of gasoline in the United States in 2005, the most recent figures the company has available, and is among the top five gasoline suppliers in the country.
The United States consumed 9.16 million barrels of gasoline a day in 2005 (about 385 million gallons) -- a number that is steadily climbing. That is an added burden to the Bush administration's goal of reducing imports (about 60 percent of U.S. oil consumption) or turning toward non-fossil transportation fuels (35 billion gallons a year by 2017).
"Energy has tended to distort the power of some of the states we find to be negative in the world -- Venezuela, Iran -- and so the more we can diversify our energy sources and depend less on oil, the better off we will be," U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns said in Sao Paulo, Brazil, after energy discussions with Brazil on an ethanol partnership.
Citgo itself has its share of enemies, a surrogate target for Chavez in the United States. Numerous Web sites promote a boycott, churning out rhetoric blasting the company's nearly all-Venezuelan executive team as well as its program to sell discount priced fuel to low-income U.S. consumers.
The Citgo-Venezuela Heating Oil Program in 2007 (the program's second year) offers more than 100 million gallons of 40 percent off heating oil to low-income residents in 16 states as well as Native American tribes.
Last week Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Chavez was "destroying" Venezuela, while John Negroponte, during his confirmation hearings last month to become Rice's deputy, said the twice-elected leader was a threat "to democracies in the region."
Chavez, who famously called Bush "the devil" during his U.N. address last fall and claims he was behind the unsuccessful 2002 coup d'etat, said the United States could get its oil elsewhere, an unlikely scenario for either country.
The tangling of politics and energy -- which aren't always mutually exclusive, if ever -- play out especially vicious when one country is the largest energy consumer in the world and it's new arch enemies number one customer.
"As a Venezuelan citizen living in the United States, I can tell you that I have seen a tendency by some U.S. media to adjust reality to pre-conceived stereotypes," Rodriguez wrote in a follow-up e-mail to UPI.
And though "changing the rule" to give the state more control "maybe creates noises," Rodriguez said, "The business is the business."
Citgo also produces lubricants, petrochemicals, refined waxes, asphalt and other industrial products, according to its Web site.
In the e-mail response, Rodriguez touts the "4,000 direct employees" in the United States and another 100,000 indirect employees at 13,000 gas stations. "The only guideline provided by President Chavez has been to urge us to fulfill our commitment to the U.S. market."
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