Luisa Palacios
Adjunct senior research scholar, Columbia CGEP; former chairwoman, Citgo Petroleum
“I really want to stress that Chevron announced another deal in Venezuela in which they are saying that they're going to invest $7 billion in the next [period].”
“US Refineries are pretty well suited to that type of crude. And much of that supply would probably flow to the Gulf Coast.”
Luisa Palacios
Adjunct senior research scholar at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy, where she previously headed research. Before CGEP she was chairwoman of Citgo Petroleum Corporation, the US refining arm of Venezuela's state oil company PDVSA. Interviewed on Columbia Energy Exchange, 2026-08-11.
What they're known for
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Why they matter to stock-market
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Said
Speaker-attributed claims extracted from diarized sources. Each bullet mirrors one entry in quotes: frontmatter — keep them in sync.
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On venezuelan-heavy-sour-return-to-usgc-coker-differential-capture:
"I really want to stress that Chevron announced another deal in Venezuela in which they are saying that they're going to invest $7 billion in the next [period]." — 2026-09-08-podcast-columbia-energy-exchange-luisa-palacios-and-bob-mcnally-on-why-the-us (2026-09-08)
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On venezuelan-heavy-sour-return-to-usgc-coker-differential-capture:
"US Refineries are pretty well suited to that type of crude. And much of that supply would probably flow to the Gulf Coast." — 2026-09-08-podcast-columbia-energy-exchange-luisa-palacios-and-bob-mcnally-on-why-the-us (2026-09-08)
Sources
Related
- venezuelan-heavy-sour-return-to-usgc-coker-differential-capture
- valero, phillips-66, marathon-petroleum
- refining-bottleneck-to-refiner-crack-capture
Why she matters to this project
She is the disinterested primary on venezuelan-heavy-sour-return-to-usgc-coker-differential-capture. Until 2026-08-13 every confirmation of that chain's input step came from refiners describing their own margin expansion — interested parties. Palacios has no equity book in the refiners and has run the specific US refining asset built for Venezuelan crude.
Mechanisms and claims
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"Venezuela is now the second most important supplier of oil exports to the US after Canada." A materially stronger statement of the chain's input step than the trade-press tonnage estimates it previously rested on.
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Production recovered to ~1.2 million bpd in June (OPEC), "about 150,000 barrels per day more than when… the US government seized Maduro." Against a pre-Chavismo peak benchmark of ~3 million bpd.
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Redirection, not just growth: ~800,000 bpd that previously moved through opaque channels to Chinese teapot refineries now flow to the US and India. Recent four-week export averages are "already at a higher level than we were in 2018" — above pre-2019-sanctions levels.
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Why the USGC configuration exists, from the inside: PDVSA acquired Citgo in the 1980s "so that it could process the kind of Venezuelan crude, that very heavy high sulfur Venezuelan crude", because the USGC investment had already been made. "It became very clear to me after being the chairwoman of the Citgo board why that acquisition was made. It was really strategic." The refinery-configuration step is a deliberate 40-year capital alignment, not a geological coincidence.
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The falsifier, stated plainly — now the primary risk on the mechanism page:
"It is completely predicated on a US sanctions policy. So if there's any change in that sanctions policy, this story ends."
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Durability caveat: uncertainty "about whether the changes that we're seeing are being pressured by the US government or whether they are part of a belief system within the current interim government. Those things matter for the sustainability and the risk of reversals."
(All from 2026-08-11-podcast-columbia-energy-exchange-luisa-palacios-on-rebuilding-venezuela-s-oil)