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Exxon Eyes Venezuela Return Nearly Two Decades After Nationalization Exit
ExxonMobil is negotiating a return to Venezuela's Orinoco Belt, eyeing the Petromonagas heavy-oil project and neighboring Carabobo assets, Reuters reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. No deal has been finalized, and Exxon and state oil company PDVSA did not immediately respond to Reuters.
Petromonagas also has a Russian state-owned shareholder - though it remains unclear how that existing interest would affect any transaction.
The talks follow months of caution from Exxon's leadership. In January, CEO Darren Woods called Venezuela "uninvestable" under its then-existing legal and commercial framework and sought durable investment protections before returning. Exxon and ConocoPhillips had departed following the nationalization of their projects, while Chevron remained through agreements with PDVSA.
The wave of re-entries followed the capture of then-president Nicolas Maduro in January and President Trump's subsequent push for U.S. companies to invest. ConocoPhillips, for its part, is refusing to negotiate a return until it is paid roughly $11 billion owed by the country and PDVSA from the expropriation of its projects, Reuters reported.
That history makes contract durability central to the investment thesis - as the most important questions are not simply whether oil can be produced, but whether a company can finance a project, retain its agreed economic interest and recover its investment over many years.
Other operators have already moved further along that process.
Chevron and Italy's Eni signed agreements on September 2 to expand Venezuelan projects. At the time, Reuters put national production at approximately 1.25 million barrels a day, compared with roughly 3 million at its late-1990s peak. The gap illustrates the scale of the potential recovery, but also how far the industry remains from its former output.
Continental Resources added another agreement Wednesday, signing a memorandum of understanding with PDVSA to develop the Ayacucho 2 block in the Orinoco Belt. That is a preliminary framework, not evidence that additional production is already flowing.
These announcements should not be treated as interchangeable. Negotiations, memorandums, definitive contracts, capital spending and completed production increases represent different stages of development. Counting them all as imminent new supply would collapse an investment process into a headline.
Chevron's financing plan provides another useful distinction.
CEO Mike Wirth said September 11 that its planned $7 billion Venezuelan expansion would be financed entirely with cash generated by existing local joint ventures, rather than money brought in from outside. The company is targeting approximately 600,000 barrels a day by 2031. Wirth also warned that oil buffers which had limited price increases earlier in the Iran conflict had been depleted.
A multiyear production target is not an immediate replacement for disrupted barrels elsewhere. And an investment funded from operating cash flow is different from an equivalent sum arriving upfront: spending capacity depends partly on the ventures' ability to generate that cash.
There are practical supply-chain requirements as well.
In February, the U.S. Treasury authorized exports and sales of American diluents to Venezuela. Those inputs are needed to produce exportable crude grades, according to the authorization reported by Reuters. The measure illustrates how an oil recovery depends not only on access to reservoirs, but also on the inputs and permissions necessary to turn production into marketable supply.
For oil markets, the useful indicators will therefore be committed spending, operating capacity and sustained export volumes, rather than the number of agreements announced.
Eni CEO Claudio Descalzi made the distinction plainly at the September 2 signing ceremony: "What we need is not just signing papers, we need barrels."
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Truancy Is Now A Mental Health Condition In Britain
Authored by Mary Gilleece via The Daily Sceptic,
Bunking off school used to be called truancy, but now 'Emotional Based School Avoidance', or EBSA, has joined the ever-growing list of supposed mental health conditions afflicting the nation's youth...
What used to be known as 'truancy' has had a smart rebrand to EBSA. Pronounced ebbsah, EBSA stands for Emotional Based School Avoidance. It is the latest woolly mental health acronym to proliferate amongst education-dodgers and those seeking to profit from them.
As nearly nine million children return to school in September there are over 200,000 children who remain at home, generally in their bedrooms scrolling on their phone or gaming. In 2025, 2.12% of pupils were severely absent, missing 50% or more of school. It's a troubling figure that continues to climb.
What was introduced as a term by West Sussex Educational Psychology Service (WSEPS) in 2018, has mushroomed across the education and mental health sectors. WSEPS defined Emotionally Based School Avoidance (EBSA) as: "A broad umbrella term used to describe a group of children and young people who have severe difficulty in attending school due to emotional factors, often resulting in prolonged absences from school."
Professionals, GPs, parents and social workers now authoritatively state that so-and-so 'has EBSA' even though it is not an officially diagnosable medical condition. Though it does not appear in any medically approved diagnostic manual, EBSA has somehow gained the imprimatur of respectability.
Parents of school-avoidant children have enthusiastically embraced this new 'condition'. Google searches for Emotional Based School Avoidance have increased by a breakout 5,000% in the past five years. The BBC has a parenting tips page dealing with the issue.
The theory around the pseudo-diagnosis of EBSA is that a child is anxious and upset about going to school; attending school is detrimental to his or her mental health; therefore he or she does not attend.
The local authority, however, is still legally obliged to provide education for that child. A wrap-around service of Alternative Provision, Non-School Education Providers or home tutors is arranged. The majority of Alternative Provision providers servicing the needs of so-called EBSA are privately owned, and their employment by county councils has escalated sharply, costing councils billions of pounds.
I work for one such operation. However, the figures for such children attending even these gentle alternatives are even worse than school attendance. Official figures report that overall absence rose in Alternative Provision to 41.35%, up from 40.94% in autumn 2024-25, with both persistent and severe absence continuing to climb.
This tallies with my experience. Every morning I will look at my timetable and see I am set to visit three children that day, but invariably I will receive such messages from parents as: "No session today, she's feeling overwhelmed." "He's still sleeping so won't be awake for session." "Not feeling it today."
The tragedy about the whole non-medical confection around EBSA is that there are indeed a great number of children who are anxious and do not enjoy going to school. They generally have a collection of conditions around them: ADHD (attention deficit and hyperactive disorder), PDA (pathological demand avoidance), ASD (autism spectrum disorder), anxiety and of course EBSA. The children that I work with live very narrow, limited lives within the terrifying space of the internet and their own minds. Their suffering is real even if the description of it is not.
The EBSA enthusiasts have it the wrong way round. The way to improve mental health is to attend rather than avoid school.
A widely ignored study conducted by Loughborough University and the Office for National Statistics revealed that absence from school causes deteriorating mental health. Based on a sample of 1.1 million children, the study reports:
The probability of presenting at hospital with mental health issues more than doubles (increases from 1.82% to 3.77%) when absences increase from 0% to 20%, and nearly triples (increases to 5.27%) at 30% absence.
Rather than saddling children with yet more spurious medical terms, it would be refreshing if educators, GPs, teachers, social workers and parents addressed the real issues that are enabling over 200,000 children to avoid school. Significantly: lack of sleep caused by phones and gaming kit in bedrooms, and insufficient exercise and nourishing food. Most importantly: lack of meaningful connections with real-life human beings. In other words: friends. These can be found at school.
Tyler Durden Fri, 09/18/2026 - 07:20