Venezuela has been in the news lately: First, Maria Corina Machado (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/María_Corina_Machado) won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work promoting democracy in her country. Then the United States, in a surprise military operation earlier this month, arrested Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro in a military raid on the country. Donald Trump is now claiming that the United States will run Venezuela, and that its oil belongs to the United States.
But as a New York Times article indicated earlier this week (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/09/world/americas/trump-oil-venezuela.html?unlocked_article_code=1.EVA.3bGX.SsIYhC5dWThz&smid=url-share), Trump seems much more enthusiastic about oil companies helping to extract, refine, and sell Venezuelan petroleum than the oil companies themselves are.
Their reluctance is partly because Venezuelan oil is very heavy (requiring special refineries), partly because the infrastructure on the ground will need many billions of dollars over many years to be ready for use, and partly because oil prices are already low – and adding more supply will just lower them further. Plus, the combination of an unknown, unstable political situation in Venezuela and Trump's mercurial demands aren't a golden business opportunity.
This week, I thought it might be interesting to look at some data about Venezuela's petroleum industry, comparing it with other metrics.
Data and five questions
This week, we'll get some data from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), which has information about Venezuela's monthly production of petroleum and other liquids, as well as the annual refined petroleum products consumption. You can download those in CSV format from. https://www.eia.gov/international/data/country/VEN
Other data comes from FRED, at the St. Louis Federal Reserve (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/). We'll specifically look at the SAUNGDPMOMBD data set, for oil production in Saudi Arabia, and DCOILWTICO, with West Texas Intermediate oil prices.
Paid subscribers, as usual, get all of the questions and answers, as well as downloadable data files, downloadable versions of my notebooks, one-click access to my notebooks, and invitations to monthly office hours.
Learning goals for this week include CSV files, cleaning data, working with dates and times, correlations, and window functions.
Here are this week's five questions:
- Read the data about "petroleum and other liquids" into a Pandas data frame. In which month did they start to export a liquid other than petroleum? In which month did Venezuela export the most barrels of oil? Create a line plot showing, per year, the number of barrels exported.
- Now download data from FRED describing annual oil production (in barrels/day) in Saudi Arabia. Plot this against the data from Venezuela. Over the last decade, in how many years has oil production risen vs. declined?