Geological SurveyCategory: Organizations, agencies, and programs Date: Established March 3, 1879 The scientific and resource management accomplish-ments of the United States Geological
Trang 1U.S Geological Survey
Category: Organizations, agencies, and programs
Date: Established March 3, 1879
The scientific and resource management
accomplish-ments of the United States Geological Survey (USGS)
are global in their applications The USGS provides
scientific services to more than one hundred countries.
In addition, USGS scientists and technicians
con-tinue to develop analytical techniques and
instrumen-tation in order to provide reliable scientific data to help
world leaders make decisions.
Background
The policy of westward expansion of the early United
States created the need for more precise maps and an
accurate assessment of the mineral wealth and natural
resources of these lands In 1803, Thomas Jefferson
authorized the purchase of the Louisiana Territory
from France and, in the process, nearly doubled the
size of the country In an attempt to assess what the
U.S had purchased, Jefferson commissioned
Meri-wether Lewis and William Clark to explore the
north-western portion of the territory as far as the Pacific
Ocean Upon their return, Lewis and Clark provided
maps and scientific reports describing all the wonders
they had seen during the expedition Further
explo-ration of the Louisiana Territory took Zebulon Pike
west into Colorado and New Mexico All of these
ex-peditions demonstrated clearly the economic
poten-tial of the region They also highlighted the need for
additional scientific knowledge of these lands and for
more detailed maps to aid future settlers
Prior to the creation of the USGS in 1879, scientific
investigations of natural resources were considered
the responsibility of individual states or private
orga-nizations In 1836, Congress authorized a scientific
expedition, the United States Exploring Expedition,
to the Pacific to evaluate the potential of its
commer-cial resources Then in 1838, Congress established the
Corps of Topographical Engineers to explore and
map the continent For the following twenty years the
corps geologists explored and studied the Western
wilderness In addition to their mapping activities, the
Corps of Topographical Engineers also participated
in the search for possible routes for the future
trans-continental railroads Commercial interest in this
po-tential wealth grew steadily as these explorers
pub-lished their reports This increased interest in mining and mineral resources prompted several states to es-tablish geological surveys to assess land usage and ex-plore for mineral deposits The California gold rush
of 1849 was the main event that caught the public’s attention and beckoned the easterner to head west and “strike it rich.” The large number of people stak-ing claims to minstak-ing sites, followed by the inevitable land disputes, demanded some kind of governmental intervention In response, the U.S government estab-lished the Department of the Interior to deal with issues pertaining to land ownership and natural re-sources
The USGS was formed as the result of a merger of separate surveys conducted under the authority of the Department of War and the Department of the In-terior These early surveys were the Geological Explo-ration of the Fortieth Parallel, the Geological and Geographical Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region, and the Geographical Survey Expedition West of the One Hundredth Meridian This USGS was directed to conduct research in mining geology The first direc-tor was Clarence King He essentially organized the USGS into a bureau that primarily dealt with the west-ern states In 1881, John Wesley Powell became the second director Under his leadership the USGS ex-tended its activities to include the eastern states, thus making it a national organization
The USGS’s activities are not limited to the conti-nental United States and its territories In 1897, par-ticipation in international ventures began by helping scientists find the best location for the proposed route through Nicaragua for a canal linking the Caribbean Sea with the Pacific Ocean (a proposal that eventually led to the Panama Canal) Following the Spanish-American War of 1898, USGS geologists traveled to the Philippines and Cuba to create topographical and geological maps and to assess the potential for finding sources of industrial raw materials The USGS’s areas
of scientific interest were expanding rapidly, well be-yond the traditional boundaries of the United States World Wars I and II placed additional demands on USGS scientists to find national and international sources of strategic natural resources to aid in the war effort Following World War II the USGS expanded its international interests to include the Trust Terri-tories of the Pacific Islands and Antarctica
The USGS also played an important part in the
“Space Race” of the 1960’s Its geologists helped train Apollo astronauts for their lunar missions and
Trang 2vided technical expertise for the unmanned missions
to the planets Because of the demands created by the
nuclear arms race of the Cold War, the USGS
pro-vided scientific support to the Atomic Energy
Com-mission USGS scientists participated in the
evalua-tion of the effects of underground nuclear bomb
testing and the potential environmental effects from
the “peaceful” use of atomic energy
In 1983, President Ronald Reagan extended the
U.S exclusive economic zone to a distance of 200
nau-tical miles (370 naunau-tical kilometers) from the
coun-try’s shores, placing additional demands on the USGS
Reagan’s act more than doubled the area that the
USGS had to map and evaluate for its potential
min-eral and energy resources This information was
sig-nificant to U.S oil producers concerned with the
de-clining amounts of land-based sources of petroleum
The USGS also has been particularly involved with
natural disasters and their effects upon the
popula-tion Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and floods all
represent potential hazards to the American public,
and the USGS attempts to limit the loss of life
associ-ated with these natural disasters
Impact on Resource Use
The USGS employs about ten thousand scientists,
technicians, and support personnel Its headquarters
are in Reston, Virginia, and it has major offices in
Denver, Colorado, and Menlo Park,
California Incorporated within the
organization are four major
scien-tific disciplines: biology, geography,
geology, and hydrology The USGS
is charged with the classification of
public lands, the study of geologic
formations, and the assessment of
mineral resources In 2007, the USGS
developed a scientific strategy to
study climate variation, ecosystems,
natural hazards, and wild-animal
dis-eases
The USGS also continues to
mon-itor the nation’s natural resources
These responsibilities are assigned to
four major divisions The
Conserva-tion Division deals with all operaConserva-tions
involving prospecting for,
develop-ing, and extracting leasable
miner-als These minerals include coal, gas,
oil, oil shale, phosphate, potash, and
sodium compounds that are found on public lands They also include resources on the continental shelf The USGS also is involved in the determination of the production potential of these resources Modern un-derstanding of the formation and location of energy and mineral resource deposits is rooted in fundamen-tal scientific breakthroughs made by USGS scientists The Topographic Division prepares and maintains the topographic maps of the United States and its pos-sessions It also prepares national atlases and pro-duces various special-purpose maps that provide an analysis of natural resources The USGS is the primary civilian mapping agency in the United States, produc-ing the multipurpose 1:24,000-scale, 7.5-minute quad-rangle topographic maps These maps have been widely used to determine property locations in land transfer documentation and by backpackers, hikers, and many others for recreational activities Innovative ventures with the private sector have also given the world access to digital images of neighborhoods and communities in one of the largest datasets ever made available online
The Water Resources Division is responsible for de-termining the location, amount, quality, and availabil-ity of all water, both surface water and groundwater Flood control, pollution studies, and groundwater management are among many of its activities USGS scientists have pioneered advances in hydrologic
Clarence King (leaning against the tent pole), the president of the USGS, is flanked by his team of geologists in Utah in 1869 (Getty Images)
Trang 3niques for gauging the discharge in rivers and streams.
The USGS has established a stream-gauging network
of more than seventy-four hundred gauges to provide
“real-time” stream-flow data that is vital to flood
con-trol management USGS scientists have also
devel-oped models to represent the flow of complex
ground-water systems The use and management of ground
and surface water are among the most pressing
prob-lems USGS scientists face in the twenty-first century
The Geological Division conducts research in four
areas: environmental, economic, experimental, and
marine studies Its activities provide detailed
informa-tion on various minerals and informainforma-tion pertaining
to land use and conservation of natural resources
In-cluded within the activities of the Geological Division
is basic research that is directed toward a better
un-derstanding of the Earth as a whole The USGS
main-tains an Earthquake Hazards Program that monitors
earthquake activity worldwide through its National
Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colorado
The agency also maintains a series of instruments
that monitor the 169 volcanoes scattered across the
United States and its territories and has developed
methods to help predict future eruptions The USGS
operates the National Geomagnetism Program that
monitors daily changes in the Earth’s magnetic field
Reaching far into space, the USGS also maintains
its Astrogeology Research Program that produces
maps of the Moon, Venus, Mars, and many of the
other moons in Earth’s solar system The National
Wildlife Health Center also is operated by the USGS
Its mission is to provide sound science and technical
support and to disseminate information to promote
science-based decisions affecting wildlife and
ecosys-tem health As an example, USGS biologists
devel-oped a revolutionary concept of wildlife resource
management They employed a sound scientific-based
approach that lets waterfowl conservation and recre-ational hunting work in tandem as adaptive manage-ment, not as conflicting interests As represented by its overall diversity, the USGS has evolved well beyond its original mission of mapping and minerals explora-tion
Paul P Sipiera
Further Reading
Parker, Philip M United States Geological Survey: Web-ster’s Timeline History, 1863-2007 San Diego, Calif.:
Icon Group International, 2009
U.S Geological Survey Bulletin: United States Geological Survey Washington D.C.: Author, 2009.
Worster, Donald A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell New York: Oxford University Press,
2002
Web Sites U.S Geological Survey Geography
http://geography.usgs.gov/
U.S Geological Survey Minerals Information http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/
U.S Geological Survey Water Resources of the United States http://water.usgs.gov/
See also: Bureau of Land Management, U.S.; Coast and Geodetic Survey, U.S.; Department of the Inte-rior, U.S.; Erosion and erosion control; Floods and flood control; Groundwater; Mining wastes and mine reclamation; Oil and natural gas chemistry; Soil man-agement; Strip mining; United States
Trang 4Vanadium
Category: Mineral and other nonliving resources
Where Found
Vanadium minerals are found in the United States in
Arkansas, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah Major
interna-tional sources are China, Russia, and South Africa
Va-nadium is usually associated with igneous rocks and
often with other metals, such as lead, iron, chromium,
and uranium
Primary Uses
Vanadium combined with iron, called
ferrovana-dium, is used in making special steels valued for their
toughness, resistance to wear, and stability at high
temperatures Approximately 92 percent of U.S
con-sumption of vanadium is for alloying iron and steel, with the balance used in catalysts for chemical pro-duction
Technical Definition Vanadium (atomic number 23, chemical symbol V) is
a shiny metallic element with a density of 6 kilograms per liter (less than iron) that melts at 2,188 kelvin (higher than iron) It is malleable when pure but be-comes brittle in the presence of impurities, particu-larly carbon It is stable in air at room temperature but oxidizes above 920 kelvin There are isotopes of mass numbers 50 and 51 (V50and V51) of which the former
is weakly radioactive
Description, Distribution, and Forms Vanadium occurs in the Earth’s crust at an average concentration of 136 parts per million; it is the nine-teenth most abundant element Vanadium minerals include patronite (VS4), vanadinite (Pb5[VO4]3Cl), carnotite (K[UO2][VO4]), and more than sixty oth-ers Vanadates are sometimes found in phosphate rock or titaniferous magnetite Small amounts of va-nadium occur in petroleum, oil sands, oil shale, coal, and meteorites Certain sea creatures, such as sea squirts (ascidians), accumulate vanadium from seawa-ter, attaining concentrations ten million times higher
in their blood than are in the water Low levels of vana-dium are found in most plant and animal tissues, where its function is not always clear The average hu-man body contains about 1 milligram of vanadium
History Vanadium was first noticed by Andrés Manuel del Rio (1787-1849) in 1801 in Mexico Del Rio found evi-dence of an element he called erythronium in a lead ore (probably what would today be recognized as vanadinite) He later retracted his discovery based on consulting with chemists in France In 1830, Nils Ga-briel Sefström (1787-1895), a student of Jöns Jacob Berzelius (1779-1848), working in Sweden, isolated material from iron-making slag that he realized was the same as the erythronium reported by Del Rio He named the element vanadium after the Nordic
god-Steel & iron alloys 92%
Superalloys &
other alloys
6%
Other 2%
Source:
Historical Statistics for Mineral and Material Commodities in the United States
U.S Geological Survey, 2005, vanadium statistics, in
T D Kelly and G R Matos, comps.,
, U.S Geological Survey Data Series 140 Available
online at http://pubs.usgs.gov/ds/2005/140/.
U.S End Uses of Vanadium
Trang 5dess Vanadis Neither Sefström nor Del Rio succeeded
in isolating the pure metal Berzelius was the first to
describe the element’s properties in detail
Approxi-mately 70 percent pure metallic vanadium was
pre-pared by Henry E Roscoe (1833-1915) in 1867, but
purity approaching 100 percent was not achieved
un-til the twentieth century
Obtaining Vanadium
Preliminary treatment of ores involves crushing,
pul-verizing, and sifting, followed by flotation procedures
to eliminate unwanted silicates The ore concentrates
are then roasted in air with sodium carbonate to
yield sodium metavanadate The latter is converted to
vanadium pentoxide (V2O5) by acidification, using
sulfuric acid followed by strong heating Vanadium
pentoxide is the starting material for preparation of
other vanadium compounds, or of the metal itself
Heating the pentoxide to high temperature (1,223
kelvin) with calcium in the absence of air yields
metal-lic vanadium The metal may also be obtained by
reaction of trichloride with magnesium or (in small
amounts with high purity) by thermal decomposition
of the triiodide Ferrovanadium for steelmaking contains about 50 per-cent vanadium and is made by heat-ing the pentoxide with ferrosilicon and lime in an electric furnace The lime combines with the silicon to form slag
The United States imports 76 per-cent of its ferrovanadium from the Czech Republic Most of the U.S production of vanadium is from slag, petroleum combustion residues, fly ash, or recycled catalysts Carnotite, when processed for its uranium con-tent, yields vanadium as a by-product, but mining of other vanadium min-erals is uneconomical in the United States
Uses of Vanadium Vanadium is used in alloys for air-craft and for nuclear applications Vanadium compounds are also used
in ceramics and as catalysts in the production of maleic anhydride and sulfuric acid
Pure elemental vanadium is too expensive for any but the most critical applications One is the use of vanadium foil on steel to which tita-nium is to be bonded Pure vanadium is also used to make a superconducting alloy with gallium (V3Ga) for use in electromagnets This substance becomes super-conducting below 15 kelvin
Larger amounts of vanadium are used in special steels In these cases, the starting material is ferrova-nadium, which may contain up to 80 percent vana-dium (lower grades are available) Tool steels contain-ing vanadium, iron, and chromium are used for socket wrenches, pliers, and knife blades Vanadium content
of tool steels can be as high as 4 percent Smaller amounts of vanadium (a few tenths of a percent) are added to many steels to combine with carbon and ni-trogen and improve grain size Some of the beneficial effects of vanadium in steel result from vanadium car-bides, which may form spontaneously from the carbon
in steel or may be added as such Vanadium carbides are produced by heating sodium metavanadate with carbon in a vacuum furnace
Vanadium steel finds application in automobile parts such as axles, transmission parts, and springs,
A prospector stands adjacent to a vanadium shaft in Grand County, Utah, in this 1911
photograph (USGS)
Trang 6where it is valued for its light weight, toughness, and
resistance to wear The famous Model-T Ford of the
early twentieth century was advertised to contain
va-nadium steel parts In the military, vava-nadium steel is
used for armor and for soldiers’ helmets
In vanadium alloys, corrosion resistance combined
with strength is important for the pipes and tubes
used in boilers and chemical plants In nuclear
reac-tors, not only corrosion resistance but also the low
cross section of vanadium for the capture of thermal
neutrons is favorable An example is an alloy of 80
per-cent vanadium, 15 perper-cent chromium, and 5 perper-cent
titanium, which is suitable for fast breeder reactors
us-ing liquid sodium potassium alloy as coolant
Vanadium is also used in nonferrous materials,
par-ticularly aluminum and titanium alloys An alloy of 90
percent titanium, 4 percent aluminum, and 6 percent
vanadium is as strong as but lighter than steel and
suit-able for use in aircraft
Vanadium compounds are used in catalytic
appli-cations Probably the most important of these is in the
contact process for sulfuric acid manufacture, where
vanadium pentoxide is used to catalyze the reaction
of oxygen with sulfur dioxide Oxidation reactions
catalyzed by vanadium pentoxide include the
oxida-tion of naphthalene to phthalic anhydride and of
bu-tene to maleic anhydride Vanadium compounds such
as vanadium trichloride and vanadium oxytrichloride
are components, along with organoaluminum
com-pounds, of catalyst systems for manufacturing
vari-ous polyolefins, including ethylene propylene diene
type M (EDPM) synthetic rubber This product has
superior properties for automotive gaskets and hoses
and membranes under the shingles of the roof of a
building
Other applications of vanadium compounds
in-clude the use of vanadium salts to catalyze the
oxida-tion of aniline in manufacture of the dyestuff aniline
black and the use of vanadium pentoxide as a mordant
in dyeing Small amounts of vanadium pentoxide are
used in ceramic glazes and as an additive in glass to
re-duce transmission of ultraviolet light There is
inter-est in silver vanadium oxide as a cathode material in
lithium batteries with high energy densities
Vanadium may be an essential trace mineral in
nu-trition and is an ingredient of vitamin and mineral
supplements There is some evidence that vanadium
compounds are helpful in potentiating the effect of
insulin in the treatment of diabetes, but no specific
treatment has received government approval
Vana-dium compounds have also been shown to kill cancer cells, but again, no approved treatment is available There are health issues relating to vanadium In-dustrial exposure to vanadium-containing dust is a health hazard that may be encountered in milling or machining of vanadium alloys or in handling vana-dium chemicals such as vanavana-dium pentoxide Fly ash from combustion of coal and soot from combustion of heavy oil are sources of vanadium in the environment Eye and lung irritation and other problems can result from exposure
John R Phillips
Further Reading
Emsley, John Nature’s Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements New York: Oxford University Press,
2001
Kaminski, Walter “Polyolefins.” In Handbook of Polymer Synthesis, edited by H R Kricheldorf et al 2d ed.
New York: Marcel Dekker, 2005
Lide, David R., ed CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Phys-ics 87th ed Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC Press, 2006 Polyak, Désirée E “Vanadium.” In Minerals Yearbook: Metals and Minerals 2007 Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 2009
Tracey, Alan S., Dail Ruth Willsky, and E Takeuchi Va-nadium: Chemistry, Biochemistry, Pharmacology and Practical Applications Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC Press,
2007
Wiberg, Egon, Nils Wiberg, and A F Holleman Inor-ganic Chemistry New York: Academic Press, 2001.
Woollery, M “Vanadium and Vanadium Alloys.” In
Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology 5th
ed New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2007
Web Sites Natural Resources Canada Canadian Minerals Yearbook, 2001: Vanadium http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/smm-mms/busi-indu/cmy-amc/content/2001/65.pdf
U.S Geological Survey Mineral Information: Vanadium Statistics and Information
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/
commodity/vanadium/
See also: Chromium; Gallium; Iron; Magnesium; Minerals, structure and physical properties of
Trang 7Categories: Countries; government and resources
Until the mid-1930’s, Venezuela’s principal export
was coffee, but the discovery and exploitation of oil—
which began in the early 1900’s but peaked later in
the century—changed the economic orientation of the
country Oil remains the principal product and
ex-port, and the nation consistently ranks among the top
ten exporters of oil in the global economy The country
is Latin America’s most important oil producer, but
economists warn that Venezuela is too dependent on
this sole commodity; as the price of oil goes up or down,
so does the nation’s economy.
The Country
Venezuela is a tropical country that sits along the
northern coast of South America The Caribbean
Sea and Atlantic Ocean demarcate its shoreline The
northern third of Venezuela consists of narrow coastal
lowlands, a branch of the Andes Mountains, and a
teardrop-shaped Lake Maracaibo Its midsection is
the expansive east-west grass-covered plains of the Orinoco River and its western tributaries The south-ern part of the country consists mostly of the ancient rocks of the Guiana Highlands Colombia, Brazil, and Guyana are to the west, south, and east, respectively Venezuela’s total area is roughly twice the size of Cali-fornia Venezuela is a mid-sized country for South America It is about one-tenth the size of Brazil (South American’s largest country) but ten times larger than French Guiana (the continent’s smallest country)
In 2008, Venezuela had the world’s thirty-third largest economy, but it is one of the world’s leading producers of crude oil The principal oil deposits are under the offshore Caribbean-Atlantic shelf, the Maracaibo basin, and the Orinoco plains This re-source accounts for about 90 percent of the total value
of the nation’s exports, and it gives the country a trade surplus annually The nation also exports iron, steel, and aluminum because of a juxtaposition of water power, iron ore, and bauxite in the Guiana Highlands Petroleum
Venezuela was the seventh-largest net oil exporter in
2007 The government nationalized its oil industry
An oil refinery in Morón, Venezuela The petroleum industry accounts for about 80 percent of the country’s exports (AFP/Getty Images)
Trang 8Global Resources Venezuela • 1293
Venezuela: Resources at a Glance
Official name: Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela Government: Federal republic
Capital city: Caracas Area: 352,170 mi2; 912,050 km2
Population (2009 est.): 26,814,843 Language: Spanish
Monetary unit: bolivar (VEF)
Economic summary:
GDP composition by sector (2008 est.): agriculture, 3.8%; industry, 37.6%; services, 58.6%
Natural resources: petroleum, natural gas, iron ore, gold, bauxite, other minerals, hydropower, diamonds
Land use (2005): arable land, 2.85%; permanent crops, 0.88%; other, 96.27%
Industries: petroleum, construction materials, food processing, textiles, iron ore mining, steel, aluminum, motor
vehicle assembly
Agricultural products: corn, sorghum, sugarcane, rice, bananas, vegetables, coffee, beef, pork, milk, eggs, fish
Exports (2008 est.): $93.54 billion
Commodities exported: petroleum, bauxite and aluminum, steel, chemicals, agricultural products, basic manufactures Imports (2008 est.): $48.1 billion
Commodities imported: raw materials, machinery and equipment, transport equipment, construction materials
Labor force (2008 est.): 12.59 million
Labor force by occupation (1997 est.): agriculture, 13%; industry, 23%; services, 64%
Energy resources:
Electricity production (2007 est.): 110.7 billion kWh
Electricity consumption (2006 est.): 83.84 billion kWh
Electricity exports (2006 est.): 542 million kWh
Electricity imports (2007 est.): 0 kWh
Natural gas production (2007 est.): 26.5 billion m3
Natural gas consumption (2007 est.): 26.5 billion m3
Natural gas exports (2007 est.): 0 m3
Natural gas imports (2007 est.): 0 m3
Natural gas proved reserves ( Jan 2008 est.): 4.708 trillion m3
Oil production (2007 est.): 2.667 million bbl/day Oil imports (2006 est.): 0 bbl/day
Oil proved reserves ( Jan 2008 est.): 78.27 billion bbl
Source: Data from The World Factbook 2009 Washington, D.C.: Central Intelligence Agency, 2009.
Notes: Data are the most recent tracked by the CIA Values are given in U.S dollars Abbreviations: bbl/day = barrels per day;
GDP = gross domestic product; km 2 = square kilometers; kWh = kilowatt-hours; m 3 = cubic meters; mi 2 = square miles.
Caracas
Venezuela
Brazil
Trinidad
y Tobago
C a r i b b e a n S e a
Trang 9in 1975-1976, creating Petróleos de Venezuela S.A.
(PDVSA), the country’s state-run oil and natural gas
company PDVSA accounts for about 50 percent of
the government’s revenue and about 80 percent of
nation’s export earnings The company has lucrative
contracts with foreign companies that drill for the
country’s oil and natural gas PDVSA refines about
one-third of the crude oil and all the natural gas that
these ventures produce The remaining crude oil is
shipped to other countries (mainly to the United
States) for refining CITGO, a familiar company name
in the United States, is a wholly owned subsidiary of
PDVSA that has about fourteen thousand branded
retail outlets (both directly owned and affiliates) in
the United States
Oil production in Venezuela comes from four
ma-jor sedimentary basins: Maracaibo, Falcón, Apure,
and Oriental The latter three basins make up the
so-called “Orinoco Belt,” which runs east-west across the
middle of the country in the Orinoco plains region
The Maracaibo basin supplies slightly less than
one-half of Venezuela’s oil production The increasing
depth of remaining oil in this basin requires heavy
in-vestment to maintain current capacity For example,
in order to lessen an ongoing decline in withdrawal
rates, oil drillers reinject natural gas into the oil
reser-voirs in order to increase pressure in the deeper wells
The Orinoco Belt has crude oil that is extra heavy
and requires unconventional extraction and refining
methods Refineries along the U.S Gulf coast are
spe-cifically designed to handle the heavy crude varieties;
consequently, that region is the largest recipient of
the Orinoco crude exports Besides the United States,
other important destinations of Venezuelan
petro-leum include South America, Europe, and the
Carib-bean (especially Cuba) Much of the crude oil that is
exported to the Caribbean is refined there and
re-exported as petroleum products to other locations
Industry experts calculate production was 2.7
mil-lion barrels of oil per day in 2007, but the production
could be higher, because unexploited recoverable
re-serves in the Orinoco Belt range from 100 to 270
bil-lion barrels Venezuela’s oil production has fallen, but
PDVSA has planned to develop the Orinoco Belt
re-serves aggressively The most notable companies
drill-ing in this region—such as Conoco-Philips, Chevron
Texaco, and Exxon-Mobil—were American until 2008
and 2009, when PDVSA signed contracts with oil
com-panies from India, Japan, Russia, Iran, and China to
exploit the heavy Orinoco crude
Natural Gas Venezuela does not export natural gas to the global economy, a fact that is likely to change in the future The nation had 4.7 trillion cubic meters of proven natural gas reserves in 2008; in the Western Hemi-sphere, only Canada had more reserves About 90 per-cent of Venezuela’s natural gas production occurs in association with oil reserves As a result, the petro-leum industry consumes more than 70 percent of Venezuela’s natural gas production, with the largest share of that consumption in the form of reinjection
to aid crude oil extraction PDVSA produces the larg-est amount of natural gas in the country, because there is limited participation of privately owned Vene-zuelan companies in the sector However, since the late 1990’s, the government has permitted foreign private companies to explore for new reserves in the Orinoco River delta region and off the northeast coast The exploratory work has proved that the natu-ral gas reserves in both areas are commercially viable The offshore reserves straddle the maritime bound-ary between Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago The two countries reached an accord spliting the mar-itime reserves in 2007; 75 percent of the production will go to Venezuela
As of 2009, Venezuela planned to build liquefied natural gas (LNG) plants that convert natural gas, which is predominantly methane (CH4), to liquid form for ease of storage and exporting In 2008, Venezuela signed agreements to create three joint venture com-panies to build the plants along the northern coast of the country PDVSA planned to use the plants to liq-uefy the gas piped from offshore gas-drilling plat-forms In 2009, PDVSA announced the signing of
a multibillion-dollar joint venture with Portuguese, Argentine, U.S., and Japanese firms to develop the massive offshore natural gas fields According to the agreement, PDVSA will have a majority stake in the venture and will construct and operate two liquefac-tion plants at the Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho indus-trial complex The company will also construct pipe-lines to transport the fuel from the gas fields to the LNG facilities The state-run PDVSA is expected to begin exporting this resource to South America, Eu-rope, the Caribbean, and Asia by 2013 or 2014 Water Power
Hydroelectricity is electrical power that dammed stream water generates when it is released through turbines It is a renewable form of energy and
Trang 10fore relatively cheap to produce compared to energy
derived from fossil fuels Venezuela ranks ninth in
per-capita production of hydroelectricity among the
149 nations that produce it Hydroelectric energy
sup-plies 25 percent of the country’s energy needs
(com-pared to 5.6 percent in the United States) The
na-tion’s hydroelectricity comes from dams built on the
rivers of the Guiana Highlands, especially the Caroní
River, which has four dams The government planned
to build two more dams on that river The Guri Dam,
which is just above the mouth of the Caroní, began
op-erations in 1978 and has the third largest generating
capacity among hydroelectric dams in the world The
Three Gorges Dam in China and the Itapúa Dam on
the border of Brazil and Paraguay are first and second
in generating capacity, respectively
Water power is important to Venezuela’s
participa-tion in the global economy in three ways First, the
us-age of water power rather than oil to produce energy
allows the country to sell more of its oil to other
na-tions Second, Venezuela generates more
hydroelec-tricity than it consumes, so it earns extra income by
exporting surplus hydroelectricity to neighboring
Co-lombia and Brazil Third, and most important from
an economic standpoint, Venezuela is able to use
low-cost hydroelectricity to produce and export large
amounts of iron, steel, and aluminum to the global
market In value terms, iron and steel exports rank
second and aluminum ranks third in Venezuela’s
overseas economy
Iron Ore
Venezuela’s iron-ore deposits are in the Guiana
High-lands, which rise behind the city of Ciudad Guayana,
the industrial heart of the country The fast-flowing
Caroní River descends from the mountains to
gener-ate the electricity that powers the iron and steel mills
of the city The city, which is near the juncture of
the Caroní and Orinoco rivers, is one of Venezuela’s
fastest-growing urban centers Demographers expect
that Ciudad Guayana will reach two million people by
2030 The city’s growing economy and Venezuela’s
steel production would not be possible without the
juxtaposition of iron ore and the Guiana Highland’s
fast-flowing rivers
The mining of iron ore for steel production
domi-nates the economy of the Guiana Highlands In the
vastness of the mountains lie huge deposits of iron ore
and bauxite (the raw material for aluminum) The
re-gion also has deposits of gold, silver, uranium, nickel,
and phosphates, but iron ore is the most abundant and valuable ore of the region Bauxite ranks second
in value After World War II, the great iron-ore depos-its on the northern rim of the plateau attracted the former giants of the U.S steel industry—the U.S Steel and Bethlehem Steel corporations—to the re-gion Both companies had large open-pit mines The main U.S Steel mine covered the entire top of the mountain Cerro Bolívar Bethlehem Steel’s main mine was nearby at the town of El Piar These companies mined the ore and shipped it a short distance by rail to barges waiting on the Orinoco River The barges took the ore to the Paria Peninsula, just beyond the mouth
of the Orinoco There, the ore was loaded on ocean-going carriers for export to the United States The Venezuelan government took over the iron-mining operations in 1975 It now controls all aspects
of iron-ore mining and steel production through the mining conglomerate CVG Ferrominera Orinoco The company controls the extracting, processing, transporting, and marketing of the iron ore and its products Its headquarters are in Puerto Ordaz Rather than exporting the iron ore as the U.S companies did, Ferrominera processes it into iron and steel at its plants at Ciudad Guayana The largest market for Ven-ezuelan steel is the domestic oil industry PDVSA needs structural steel and iron and steel pipes Never-theless, iron-ore products—iron, iron pellets and in-gots, and flat-rolled sheets of iron and steel—rank second (behind petroleum) in value among the coun-try’s global exports Venezuela was thirteenth in pro-duction of iron ore in 2008
Bauxite Venezuela has one of the world’s largest supplies of bauxite, the ore for making aluminum Like iron ore, bauxite is in the country’s enormous Guiana High-lands region The bauxite is a residual rock that formed as a result of laterization of Tertiary sediments that lay horizontally and unconformably on the Pre-cambrian basement rocks of the highlands Except for the dissected topography, the bauxite is relatively accessible in two horizontal layers about 4 to 10 me-ters below the summit surfaces
The bauxite ore consists of one or more aluminum hydroxide minerals plus various mixtures of alumina-silicates (such as clay), iron oxide, silica, titanium, and other impurities in trace amounts Processing alumina starts with separating it from ore by means of
a wet chemical caustic leach process Next, the