The May 2021 Super Moon as seen from California. Ringo HW Chiu (AP)
“Oil geologists really are occultists,” says one of them, Texan Rick Bass, in a strange and memorable book Oil Notes. “These are people,” says Bass, “who can talk for hours about things and movements that are happening in the bosom of the planet and that no one but them can see.”
One of these geognostic prodigies is Gustavo Coronel, the Venezuelan oil geologist who collected limestone in the Venezuelan Andes as early as 1955. He is the author of Oil Comes from the Moon (author’s edition, 2010), the book whose title usurps my column today.
Soon to be 90 years old, Coronel is one of the most respected voices of Venezuelans of all generations and walks of life. The political columns he still publishes in El Nacional can be rude but never coarse. Coming from the moon, Oil gathers his not always exclusively geological or entrepreneurial experience and observations for well over half a century in which Coronel became an inevitable figure in the global oil industry.
In it he recounts the adventures – including gallant ones – of a life as an oil geologist with pickaxe, compass and notepad, first as manager of oil companies, between 1948, working for transnational concessionaires and later from 1976 as one of the great captains of the state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA ) until 1998, when the “Chavez era” began.
My favorite chapters are set due to the intensity of what they tell and the poignancy of the author’s impeachment in Indonesia before and during the massacres that claimed the lives of at least half a million people between 1965 and 1966, many of them local members of the Indonesian Communist Party or ethnic Chinese minority. Coronel is also the author of a documented (and heartbreaking) history of oil nationalization published in 1983.
When we returned to Indonesia, the anti-Western violence of those days of decolonization was directed at foreigners of European descent. Coronel’s mestizos, distinguished and cosmopolitan demeanor made him a character worthy of an Eric Ambler novel, and allowed him to intervene with great presence of mind at the head of the Royal Dutch Shell refineries, which were dangerously under siege, to save many Own life and save your life. But why over the moon?
When I first read the title in manuscript more than thirty years ago—I worked for a publisher in Caracas that eventually inexplicably refused to publish it—I thought it was a book about indigenous cosmogonies
pre-Columbian Even then it seemed to me a unique and captivating text: the story he wanted to fictionalize about his life as an oilman.
A long time later I discovered that Dr. Coronel decided to self-publish, so I could read and enjoy it again. He offers it for free to anyone who wants to download it from his blog Las Armas de Coronel. Once here, it will be better to let him speak, taken from a brief chronicle of how he came up with such an enigmatic title for his memoirs:
“In the Sierra de Perijá, that mountain range that marks the border between Venezuela and Colombia, land of tapirs and jaguars, home of the Venezuelan yucpas and baris and the Colombian irokos, flows a canyon called La Luna. And in this gorge there are plenty of rocky outcrops from the Late Cretaceous period, when the Ammonites were queens of the seas. These rocks have been identified by geologists as belonging to the La Luna Formation.”
The Moon is thus the type locality of this formation, the place where this rock sequence was first studied in detail and appears most radiant and complete.
There, 75 million years ago, in an insufficiently oxygenated environment, organic sediments began to accumulate, which slowly turned into hydrocarbons. It is the so-called bedrock that, according to calculations by Coronel, has to date produced around 40,000 million barrels of oil in the Maracaibo sedimentary basin alone.
Ever since I was a child I found the language of the geologists I dealt with in the oil fields where my father worked very impressive. One notices this, for example, in the books of Freiherr von Humboldt, the volcanologist, aesthete and writer of great virtue. Sigmund Freud admits that he had no hesitation in appropriating distinctly geological terms like “dip” and “outcrop” to refer precisely to what descends or emerges from the unconscious. This linguistic intuition shines in Coronel’s prose.
So geologists often do without geopolitical conventions and prefer to speak of “regions”, of subterranean “provinces” that are much larger than the territories framed on the maps.
And therefore it is also quite natural and appropriate for them that the Colombian basins of the Magdalena Valley, the Colombian Plain or the Putumayo, which are lithologically related to the rocks of the Sierra de Perijá, are called formation moons.
The Vaca Muerta Formation in Argentina, to give another example, features rocks with a “face” similar to that of the moon. Its reserves are now estimated at 22 billion barrels.” Coronel comments in the above article how the philosopher Orlando Cabrales, a Colombian oil expert, stated some time ago that the geologists of Argentina’s YPF consider the Vaca Muerta deposit to be comparable to the La Luna Formation. In Guyana, east of the mouth of the Orinoco, one block inland from the Atlantic, the so-called “Canje River” formation has a type and age similar to that of the moon.
Thus, sister countries, far apart and with different legal regimes, stretch across the same inexhaustible subterranean mantle of shared wealth that comes to us from the moon.
On the surface, the greed of transnational corporations and the “redistributive” negligence of corrupt populism have perversely combined for more than a century to make the myth of King Midas a reality, degrade the environment and plunge people into misery , millions of Latin Americans.