Following Maduro’s arrest last weekend, the Donald Trump administration plans to sell Venezuelan-produced heavy, high-sulfur, corrosive crude oil in the United States. Refineries along the U.S. Gulf Coast, from Corpus Christi, Texas, to Pascagoula, Mississippi, are equipped to process this type of crude.According to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), the combined potential processing capacity of 21 major refineries along the coast exceeds 7 million barrels per day. Texas is the core region, concentrating the largest share of this capacity.Motiva’s refinery in Port Arthur, Texas, tops the list with a capacity of 640,500 barrels per day.Since the 1990s, refiners have been retrofitting their facilities to increase coking capacity and upgrade steel structures to handle the growing volume of heavy, high-sulfur crude from Venezuela, Mexico, and Ecuador.PDVSA, Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, had purchased two U.S. refineries and established partnerships with ExxonMobil and LyondellBasell at two others.However, by the early 2000s, as Latin American crude oil production declined, refineries in the U.S. Midwest that had previously received Venezuelan crude switched to heavy crude from Canadian oil fields.