Billionaire investor Jim Mellon said that Venezuela’s oil industry faces a long and difficult road to recovery, with meaningful production gains unlikely to materialize anytime soon.

Venezuela’s Oil Recovery A Long-Term Story

Speaking on the Master Investor podcast on Wednesday, Mellon cautioned that any meaningful recovery in Venezuela’s oil sector remains a long-term story. “It will take at least 5 to 10 years before they can get back up to what they had,” he said, which is an output of 3 million barrels of crude oil per day.

While that level of output would represent a meaningful rebound for Venezuela, he noted that “in the context of over 100 million barrels a day,” which is the current global daily output, it is just “enough to change things at the margin.”

Mellon also said that Venezuela's output, which predominantly consists of heavy crude, uniquely positions U.S. refiners to benefit first ...