Venezuela takes operations from big oil companies

By Brian Ellsworth

PUERTO PIRITU, Venezuela (Reuters) - Venezuela will strip the world's biggest oil companies of operational control over massive Orinoco Belt crude projects on Tuesday, a vital move in President Hugo Chavez's nationalisation drive.

The May Day takeover comes exactly a year after Bolivian President Evo Morales, a leftist ally of Chavez, startled investors by ordering troops to seize his country's gas fields, accelerating Latin America's struggle to reclaim resources.

"The importance of this is that we are taking back control of the Orinoco Belt which the president rightly calls the world's biggest crude reserve," said Marco Ojeda, an oil union leader before a planned rally led to mark the transfer.

The four projects are valued at more than $30 billion (15 billion pounds) and can convert about 600,000 barrels per day (bpd) of heavy, tarry crude into valuable synthetic oil.

U.S. companies ConocoPhillips, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Britain's BP, Norway's Statoil and France's Total have agreed to obey a decree to transfer operational control, although the OPEC nation has complained ConocoPhillips has resisted.

In Puerto Piritu, near the facilities that refine Orinoco crude, workers prepared to celebrate the takeovers, displaying Venezuelan red, blue and yellow flags and painting a wall with Chavez's slogan: "Homeland, Socialism or Death".

The anti-U.S. leader has vowed to take at least 60 percent of the projects, radicalising a self-styled leftist revolution in which he is ruling by decree and politicising the army, state oil company and judiciary.

He is also quickly nationalising power utilities and the country's biggest telephone company.