“The New York Times has created a map showing where the planet’s proven oil reserves are located [no paywall] using data from the Oil & Gas Journal. The visualization sizes each country’s circle according to the number of barrels it holds. The smallest circles represent about 10 billion barrels, while the largest exceed 300 billion. Venezuela has one of the largest circles on the map, representing a reserve far larger than Canada, Russia, or the United States—and even larger than Saudi Arabia….Venezuela has roughly 17 percent of the world’s known oil reserves, or more than 300 billion barrels, according to the Oil & Gas Journal, an industry publication. In other words, that’s how much oil experts believe could be extracted from the country’s territory. To put that in context, the United States, the world’s top oil producer, has an estimated 81 billion barrels of proven reserves. Venezuela pumped almost 5 percent of the world’s oil in 1997, but years of mismanagement, underinvestment and U.S. sanctions have squeezed output. The difficulty of extracting the country’s tar-like oil has also complicated matters…”