And to make it worse, the US is the only buyer for most of their oil, on account of how sour it is. For the US, it's not too bad of a deal to buy Venezuelan sour crude, ship it a short distance to the various US Gulf Coast refineries, and process it into a usable petroleum product for domestic consumption. For everyone else in the world, it doesn't make much sense from a financial perspective to ship sour crude halfway around the world before processing it. Of course, if Maduro had not kicked out all the American petroleum companies and their engineers, Venezuela would be able to refine their own sour crude and ship it anywhere they want in the world, but as it stands the Venezuelan refineries are all rusting and nonoperational from lack of parts and maintenance.