Transcript
Narrator/Analyst (0:00)
Now, Donald Trump is insisting that the main reason he's interested in Venezuela, the main reason the US is kind of looking at tankers off the coast of Venezuela, comes back to drugs, the trade, the smuggling of illegal drugs out of Venezuela. But what if it's not just that? Maybe there's something else going on? What if it's partly about oil? Now, on the surface, you might be thinking, why does America even need Venezuelan oil? And I can kind of understand your point, because if you look at just total oil production, look, this is up until 2005. The US was there, Venezuela was there, Saudi Arabia was there. But as you probably know, since then, everything has changed. Look, American output has gone through the roof way above Saudi Arabia, way above Saudi Arabia. And Venezuela has gone basically to the floor. And that's going to post Chavez, Maduro, they're one of the minnows Now, I think, 21st biggest producer in the world. So again, that question. Why should America care? Well, in the us, that big rise is largely down to this. It's down to the shale revolution. So you've got fracking all around the US producing extraordinary amounts of crude oil. And here's where we get to the interesting bit, because when you're thinking about crude oil, maybe you're just thinking about, well, barrels of oil. It's all the same, isn't it? Well, actually, no. So if you kind of look at crude oil, there are various different types of crude in different parts of the world. There's actually kind of various different ways you can categorize it. But one way you can look at it. Look at it is look at the kind of density. So you're basically looking at how thick that crude is. And when I say thick, I mean literally how thick. This is showing you global production broken down by the density of that oil. And so you've got the kind of medium stuff. And this is probably, if you're thinking, if you've got kind of image in your mind of what crude oil looks like, it's a bit like this. You know, it's kind of black, but it's. It's not too viscous. It flows around. But there's other stuff as well. So this, this is light crude and it kind of almost looks like a smoothie, doesn't it? And that's the same stuff. This is still crude oil, but down to the kind of geological and the biological conditions in the ground when it was being formed, you know, hundreds of millions of years ago, it comes out looking a bit different. And so that's Light, you've also got heavy stuff and it's, it's kind of relatively small in global production. But this is gloopy. So super viscous stuff. Heavy oil. So heavy, medium, light. Remember that. And remember also, the key thing here is you get it out of the ground. It may look like that, but ultimately you still need it to go into, you know, someone's car or indeed, you know, be turned into chemicals. Basically, you need to process it.
News Anchor (2:34)
Major breaking news from Venezuela. President Trump says the United States successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela in an overnight operation. In a social media post, he added that Venezuela's lead leader, Nicolas Maduro and his wife were, quote, captured and flown out of the country. This operation was done in conjunction with US Law enforcement. President Trump will deliver a news conference from Mar a Lago at 11am, joined by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Kaine. In a brief interview with the New York Times, President Trump called the mission, quote, a lot of good planning and lot of great, great troops and great people. It was a brilliant operation.