Syn - From 2013 -
http://blogs.platts.com/2013/11/25/pdvsa-woes/At the Wellhead: Venezuela’s upgraders are maxed out to handle its heavy oilVenezuela has extensive heavy oil reserves, and increasingly, no way of treating it. It’s not a feedstock that can just get thrown into any refinery. Platts Venezuelan correspondent Mery Mogollon discusses that particular problem–one of many–in this week’s Oilgram News column.
Venezuela is producing more extra heavy crude in its oil fields in the Orinoco Belt region than it can process in the four “upgraders” that were built more than a decade ago. The upgraders were built by foreign oil companies and have a combined capacity of 630,000 b/d, or 51% of the actual aggregated output. With 297 billion barrels in proved and probable reserves covering more than 55,000 square kilometers in Venezuela’s southeast, the Orinoco Belt is one of the world’s greatest oil repositories.
But a lack of investment in recent years has stressed its refining, upgrading and transport infrastructure and is impeding increases in output.“The upgraders are at their limit. We are producing a lot of diluted crude oil, or extra heavy oil that is mixed with naphtha, which is why we need to resolve the bottlenecks with the upgraders and expand their capacity with our present partners or with new ones,” said Rafael Ramirez, who is both president of state-owned PDVSA and the nation’s petroleum and mining minister. He spoke this month before international oil executives in Caracas.
Upgraders are plants that heat and dehydrate heavy oil, improve its quality, and also mix in naphtha or lighter crude to make the tar-like substance transportable and ready to process by traditional refineries."
And from 2016 -
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... -heavy-oil"
Venezuela’s state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA is said to be looking into leasing the Aruba refinery, where it would ship tar-like oil to be upgraded into higher value synthetic crude rather than produce fuels like gasoline.
PDVSA, through its U.S. subsidiary Citgo Petroleum Corp., is in talks with the Aruba government to lease the refinery, according to an Aruba government official who isn’t authorized to speak publicly. The Caracas-based state oil company is studying whether to configure the refinery into an upgrader that processes heavy crude from Venezuela’s Orinoco Belt, according to a person familiar with the developing plan.
The plan is being considered as cash-strapped PDVSA doesn’t have the financial resources to build the oil upgraders that it needs to turn its asphalt-like crude into a product that refineries can process. The last upgraders were put into operation in the early 2000s. The country owns four of them in partnership with firms like Total SA and Chevron Corp."