Unfair to Petro Bros

Venezuela finds another imperialist conspiracy under its bed. Just listen to its oil minister Asdrubel Chavez;

"This [fracking] does not seem to raise any concerns among the governments promoting it or the companies involved," he told an OPEC seminar in Vienna attended by chief executives of some of the world's biggest oil companies, including Exxon and BP, both of which operate in U.S. shale.

"It is a responsibility of the conventional crude oil-producing countries to develop price mechanisms that take into account these economic and geopolitical actors that promote technologies that threaten the availability of the fundamental resource for human existence: water."

Which rhetoric is pretty obviously taken from environmentalists in the U.S. Ignoring that there is almost no scientific evidence that hydraulic fracturing does any such environmental damage. Now, damage to Venezuela's political environment....

The comments from Venezuela are its latest broadside against the rise of an industry that is widely cited for tipping the world's oil market into oversupply and precipitating a collapse in oil prices that has slammed the increasingly cash-strapped and unpopular government in the midst of a deep recession.

Chavez blamed fracking for creating an "involuntary price war among oil-producing brother countries".

President Nicolas Maduro has for months alleged that the United States is deliberately flooding the market with shale oil to sink prices and destabilise his OPEC nation, whose crude shipments to U.S. refiners have halved over the past decade.

Nice little oligopoly you guys had there. Too bad it's gone.