Venezuela produces 1.23 million barrels and refines 350,000: what closing the gap would cost
PDVSA's president put a company figure on the refining system's real capacity for the first time this year, and it equals 27% of what those plants were built to process. Restoring the whole system is estimated at some US$20 billion. The three possible paths, with the signal that shows which one is winning.
At Amuay there is a flexicoking unit that has not processed anything in years. For much of that time it served as a parts bin: if a pump was needed, that is where crews looked; if a pipe or an instrument was needed, the same. An engineer who recently retired from the plant describes it without drama, the way you would describe a routine procedure. That unit is part of the 645,000 barrels a day Amuay is nominally able to process. The figure PDVSA's president gave on August 14 for the country's entire refining system — all four refineries together — was 350,000.
The number deserves attention because it is not a consultancy estimate or a market calculation: the state company itself supplied it. Héctor Obregón Pérez, PDVSA's president, put real refining capacity at some 350,000 barrels a day and said that volume covered domestic gasoline and diesel demand with no fuel imports through 2025 and the first eight months of 2026. In the same interview he put crude output at 1,233,000 barrels a day.
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