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CARACAS, Venezuela — President Hugo Chávez, buffeted by means of falling oil prices that impend to extricate his efforts to establish a Socialist-inspired state, is courting Western oil companies again.

Until recently, Chávez had pushed foreign oil companies into a corner by means of nationalizing their oil fields, raiding their offices with tax authorities and august a series of royalties increases.

But faced with the plunge in prices and a slope in domestic prolongation, senior officials have begun soliciting bids from some of the largest Western oil companies in recent weeks — including Chevron, Royal Dutch/Shell and Total of France — promising them access to more of the world’s largest petroleum reserves, according to energy executives and industry consultants.

Their willingness to even consider investing in Venezuela reflects the uncommonness of projects open to foreign companies in other top oil nations, particularly in the Middle East.

What’s at stake

But the subterfuge also shows how the global monetary crisis is hampering Chávez’sitting ideological agenda and demanding his pragmatic side. At stake are Venezuela’sitting economic stability and the sustainability of his rule.

With oil prices in this way submissive, the long-standing problems plaguing Petróleos de Venezuela, the national oil company that helps keep the country afloat, have become much harder to ignore.

Embracing the Western companies may be the only way to shore up Petróleos de Venezuela and the raft of social-welfare programs, like as soundness care and higher education for the poor, that be obliged been made in posse by oil avails and have helped bolster his popular support.

“If re-engaging with alien oil companies is necessary to his political survival, then Chávez will make it,” said Roger Tissot, an authority on Venezuela’s oil industry at Gas Energy, a Brazilian consulting company focusing adhering Latin America. “He is a military man who understands losing a battle to be successful the contest of nations.”

In recent years, Chávez has preferred partnerships with national oil companies from countries such as Iran, China and Belarus. But these ventures failed to reverse Venezuela’session declining oil output. State-controlled oil companies from other nations also gain been invited to proffer this interval, if it be not that the liberal private companies are seen as having an advantage, given their expertise in building complex projects in Venezuela and elsewhere.

The requisition process was first conceived last year when oil prices were higher but Petróleos de Venezuela’s production avoid was becoming impossible to overlook.

Still, the process is persuading into exalted gear only this month, with the authorities in Caracas expected to start reviewing the companies’ bidding plans on new areas of the Orinoco Belt, an area in southerly Venezuela with some estimated 235 billion barrels of recoverable oil.

Complex projects

Altogether, besides than $20 billion in investing. could be required to assemble devilishly tangled projects capable of producing a combined 1.2 million barrels of oil a day.

Chávez’s olive branch to Western oil companies comes after he nationalized their oil fields in 2007. Two companies, ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, left Venezuela and are waging legal battles from one to another lost projects.

In the past year, by higher oil prices paving the way, Chávez vastly expanded Petróleos de Venezuela’s power, inextricably linking it to his political program. He directed the oil company to build roads, import and dispose food, build docks and shipyards and tend up a light-bulb body of factors.

Rafael Ramirez, the energy minister and president of Petróleos de Venezuela, did not respond to requests for an interview. But energy executives with contacts within Petróleos de Venezuela reported Ramirez, a confidant of Chávez’s, has been waging a struggle within the company to refocus operations toward producing more oil.

Companies mum

After the turmoil of recent years, Western oil companies are loath to speak publicly about their plans. “We don’t elaborate on bidding processes beyond the fact that we evaluate one and the other suitable and our decisions will be based on economics and other factors,” said Scott Walker, a spokesman on this account that Chevron.

But energy executives speak with restrained optimism. Nineteen companies paid $2 million each last month for data on areas open for exploration, twice what such data costs elsewhere.

Oil company officials before-mentioned they recognize the risk of investing in Venezuela, given the country’s abrupt shifts in the past. But they point of convergence on the long-term potential of its petroleum reserves. Venezuela poses little risk in the search for oil since geologists have known for years where it lies in the Orinoco Belt.