At conservative current prices, Venezuela’s proven oil reserves carry a notional value of roughly $18 trillion–comparable to the combined market capitalization of Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta and Tesla, the Magnificent Seven.
That comparison establishes scale.
What is less appreciated is that oil is not Venezuela’s only latent asset. The country also sits atop one of the largest undeveloped gold provinces in the Western Hemisphere.
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Venezuela’s official gold holdings are modest. However, geological estimates for the Orinoco Mining Arc frequently cite on the order of 7,000 to 8,000 tons of gold as potential in-ground resources.
At current gold prices, that translates into roughly $0.5 trillion of notional value.