"It's a tragedy for Venezuela" - Oil strike may be over, but industry faces high hurdles *** Getting pumps and refineries going again is not as simple as throwing a switch. The oil behemoth's skeletal staff has to tussle with complex engineering tasks, from gauging oil flow in dormant pipes to reconfiguring computer systems to replacing a catalytic cracker module on a stalled refinery. Half of Venezuela's petroleum comes from particularly viscous oil deposits, and many wells became filled with sand after the oil pressure was cut. "Some fields you should never shut down, and they were shut down," says Ramon Espinasa, a consultant at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington and a former PDVSA economist. "A large number [of wells] will have to be redrilled." Mr. Goldstein says that some wells will have to be abandoned altogether. He estimates that 400,000 barrels per day have been permanently lost.
A crowded slate of technical challenges falls to a PDVSA workforce that is practically headless, as most of the firings occurred in the ranks of senior managers, scientists, and economists. PDVSA is severely short-staffed, and workers who have been brought out of retirement are scrambling to learn new computer systems. Reaching prestrike production levels will call for further exploration, and that requires cash - yet another problem. PDVSA announced it will tighten its belt by $2.7 billion this year, nearly one-third of its budget. "To run this corporation they need capital and labor, and they have neither," says Mr. Espinasa.***