I'm John Batchel, joined by my good colleague Simon Constable, writing for the Wall Street

Journal and Fox and other distinguished publications. He's in South of France in Paradise, and we

rush immediately to his report most recently about Venezuelan oil and what is to be done. Simon, a good

day to you before we come to the happy news of your climate and your joy and living

in the south of France. You spoke with several experts, Evan Ellis of the Army War College,

Mr. Artilini, formerly of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy, to learn about this

hesitation about the Venezuelan oil field, so much so that meeting at the White House were told did not go well

because the major oil companies are reluctant to refusing to put their money at risk in Venezuela's oil fields.

Why is that, Simon, because it has said to have the reserves of the planet. Good evening to you.

Good evening to you, John. Thanks having me on the show. There are a lot of reasons why

American oil companies might not want to go there. The first thing that comes to mind is in

1976, Venezuela basically nationalized every foreign oil company operating in Venezuela.

So that would be the first thing is, is that going to happen again?

Because they don't want to spruce everything up and then move on or be moved on by the

Venezuelan government and then realize that they just basically

poured their money away or their investment, whatever way you want to look at it.

The other issue is that there's a lot of money to be spent in Venezuela on basically renovating the oil rigs and all the infrastructure that surrounds that.

Because one of the things that happened early in this century was Hugo Chavez fired an absolute

ton of great experts in the oil industry, and they left the country

largely because they could. They had all the skills to do that. But from then on, it meant these

rigs didn't get renovated or repaired on a regular basis, which you need to do when you're extracting oil.

And so basically you've got all these really rusty, if you like, want to call it that way

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