Venezuela details figures of 25-year oil deal with United States

Venezuela's interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, detailed the main aspects of the oil agreement reached with the United States, according to the outlet Bitácora Económica. According to data released by the portal, the deal provides for a 25-year period to develop 17 strategic fields, eight of which are new, unexploited blocks.

On the fiscal and commercial front, the scheme presented by Rodríguez and published by Bitácora Económica sets minimum royalties of 16% on operations and an income tax of 34%. Official projections shared by the outlet indicate that the agreement will generate revenue of $209.335 billion for the Venezuelan state, based on a reference price of $65 per barrel, a figure the interim president warned could move up or down. She also noted that about $19 per barrel produced and sold goes directly into the country.

Based on the same figures published by the outlet, a calculation by SurEconomics puts the scale of the projections in perspective. Dividing $209.335 billion by $19 per barrel yields a total of 11.017 billion barrels which, spread over the 25-year period, equates to an annual average of 1.21 million barrels per day, while the government's production target is above 1.5 million barrels per day. This gap reflects the usual distance between a maximum production target and an average calculated over a quarter century, in a context in which the government has yet to publish the detailed annual production curve that would allow the two trajectories to be compared.

This long-term average extraction rate will be the key benchmark for assessing the actual compliance and real performance of the energy agreement in the coming years.