Horton: If the price is high enough.

Horton: If the price is high enough.

Palast: If the price is at least 35 – 40 dollars a barrel. People have to understand. When we talk

about how much oil there is in the world, you have to say, at what price?

Horton: Right.

Palast: There’s not much oil in the world that you can pull up at a price of 18 dollars a barrel,

outside of Arabia. If you talk about 60 dollars a barrel for oil, you’ve got a ton of oil. You can

develop tar sands, and even more important, you can melt the heavy tar oils of Venezuela. Venezuela has

a big giant pool of tar – ninety percent of the World’s extra heavy oil. Ninety percent is in

Venezuela. That reserve of oil is about 5 times the size of Saudi Arabia’s reserve of oil. The

difference is that it costs 30-40 dollars a barrel to get Venezuelan tar into your SUV. It costs about

four bucks a barrel to get Saudi light crude into your SUV.

Horton: Right.

Palast: Forty versus four. You can see the Saudi game: crank the price up and make a lot of money; drop

the price down below forty and no one will invest in Hugo Chavez’s oil.

By the way, when you say that Chavez is nationalizing everything in site? Not the oil. He is very, very

smart. He is saying that Venezuela technically owns 51 percent of any oil venture. Any oil companies,

other than the Italian or the French, have no problem with that. Chavez needs Exxon. Even more

important, he needs Shell Oil and Conoco Phillips to invest billions of dollars in pulling up that gunk

he has in the Orinoco. That is Chavez’s game. That is why he is allied with Ahmadinejad. It has

nothing to do with fighting MBT SHOES imperialism. It has everything to do with their joint need to

maintain a minimum price of oil.