In their personal capacity, the vast majority of people would not care if their oil was sourced from Venezuela.
How could any country be worse than Saudi Arabia?
How could any country be worse than Saudi Arabia?
Oil is very different depending on the origin. Some oils have more Sulphur, some oils have more tar-like parts. Some oil is very dark and some is almost transparent-yellow.
All these differences are fixed in distillation that separates the parts and removes the impurities, but not all distillation plants an handle all the types of oil.
Anyway, after distillation most people care only about the price.
But with oil that doesn't make sense because everyone is happy to buy from the Saudis, whose last scandal involved bone saws and acid vats.
It isn't helpful to the conversation to replace gold with oil.
Gold is extracted and usually refined locally, perhaps it is exported as an alloy with Silver or Platinum or other metal. After more refinement it can be converted to gold bars.
Oil has more variety, it's a mix of a hundred (thousand?) similar compound and it's exported (almost?) raw. So the composition and the level of the impurities vary a lot from the different sources. You can't ignore the source of the oil because your refinery may not be able to use it.
A better comparison is gasoline. The difference of gasoline with a bar of gold is that gasoline is still a mix of somewhat similar substances, but the variation is small. There are many variants, with different octane rating and different additives. It's not 100% true, but gasoline is somewhat fungible and you don't care too much about the origin if it has the quality you are looking for.
The Gold in this case is the exact same as the other gold it is reporting to be
To add to this, oil is a bit different in the simple fact that you need some level of skill to work in that industry and you're generally getting a livable wage (if not a very nice one) whereas gold mining in some countries is still done by what are effectively slaves (even by children).