Brian Ellsworth
PUERTO PIRITU, Venezuela (Reuters) - Venezuela stripped the world's biggest oil companies of operational control over massive Orinoco Belt crude projects on Tuesday, a vital move in President Hugo Chavez's nationalization drive.
The May Day takeover came exactly a year after Bolivian President Evo Morales, a leftist ally of Chavez, startled investors by ordering troops to seize his country's gas fields, accelerating Latin America's struggle to reclaim resources.
"The importance of this is that we are taking back control of the Orinoco Belt which the president rightly calls the world's biggest crude reserve," said Marco Ojeda, an oil union leader before a planned rally to mark the transfer.
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The four projects are valued at more than $30 billion and can convert about 600,000 barrels per day (bpd) of heavy, tarry crude into valuable synthetic oil.
U.S. companies ConocoPhillips, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Britain's BP, Norway's Statoil and France's Total agreed to obey a decree to transfer operational control on Tuesday, although the OPEC nation complained ConocoPhillips was somewhat resistant.
In Puerto Piritu, near the facilities that refine Orinoco crude, workers prepared early on Tuesday to celebrate the takeovers, displaying Venezuelan red, blue and yellow flags and daubing a wall with Chavez's slogan: "Homeland, Socialism or Death."
The anti-American leader was also in a festive mood before a rally marking what he called the end of an era of U.S.-prescribed policies that opened up the largest oil reserves in the hemisphere to foreign investment. Continued...
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