Treasury license partially reverses a 2019 sanction that sharply curtailed the country’s oil output.

On Tuesday, after more than six years of a deliberate energy blockade, the U.S. government formally lifted the ban on the sale of diluents for heavy crude oil to Venezuela.

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The authorization was issued by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) through General License 47, which allows transactions with the Venezuelan state and the public oil company Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA).

The OFAC decision represents a partial reversal of one of the most aggressive sanctions imposed since 2019, which was explicitly designed to choke off the South American country’s main source of revenue.

The ban on access to U.S. diluents —inputs essential for processing extra-heavy crude from the Orinoco Belt — was a decisive factor in Venezuela’s historic output collapse, which fell from 3 million barrels per day to 500,000 barrels per day. This occurred amid an unprecedented financial, commercial, and logistical blockade.

Diluents such as condensate and certain specialized naphthas are not a technical luxury but a basic material condition for exploiting Venezuelan oil.

Their absence forced PDVSA to rely on improvised, costly and less efficient blends, reducing export capacity, degrading crude quality and driving up costs across the entire production chain. This is why the U.S. blockade against the Venezuelan oil industry was not symbolic, but mechanical, calculated and devastating.

Under the new license, Washington authorizes the export, sale, transport and delivery of U.S. diluents, as well as the associated financial and logistical services. However, the authorization is surrounded by a web of legal and political controls that underscore it is not a gesture of goodwill, but a tactical adjustment conditioned on U.S. strategic interests.

Currently, oil contracts are subject to U.S. courts, alternative payment mechanisms are excluded, and a system of periodic oversight is maintained over each transaction, reaffirming a logic of tutelage and sustained pressure on Venezuela’s economy.

Stable access to diluents could allow an immediate increase in Venezuelan oil production of between 20% and 30%, provided supplies are not interrupted.

Although General License 47 does not entail a full lifting of all sanctions, it does constitute an implicit admission of the failure of the “Maximum Pressure” policy that sought the Venezuelan economic and political collapse.

This shift in U.S. policy toward Venezuela comes amid an international context marked by volatile energy prices, a reconfiguration of the global geopolitical map, and a growing loss of U.S. control over strategic hydrocarbon flows.

teleSUR/ JF

Sources: OFAC – Blog La Tabla

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