Venezuela’s oil production could feasibly fall to just 500,000 barrels per day by year’s end, according to the US State Department’s Special Envoy to Venezuela in a Wednesday hearing on the crisis-stricken Latin American nation on Wednesday. The cause for the expected production declines, said Rep. Elliot Abrams, was the impact of US sanctions on Venezuela’s state-run oil company, PDVSA. The crisis in Venezuela, of which its floundering oil industry is merely one part, is “entirely manmade”, according to House Committee on Foreign Affairs Chairman Eliot L. Engel , who is also the Co-Chair of the House Oil and National Security Caucus, a champion for US energy independence, and serves on the Commission for Human Rights, who today did not mince words when he laid blame for the Venezuelan disaster squarely on Nicolas Maduro’s and Hugo Chavez’s doorstep. Two leaders, Engel said, who “have driven the country off the […]