venalum

📊 The silence is over at the Guayana docks
After nearly ten years with the furnaces running at low capacity and the docks practically silent, the state-owned Venezuelan Aluminum Company (CVG Venalum) has started shipping cargo back to the international market. The shipment exceeds 15,000 tons of primary aluminum in high-purity ingots, with a technical grade between 99.5% and 99.7%, and its destination was the United States.
The operation was set up through an alliance between the Guayana-based company, the trading firm Mercuria Energy Group LTD, and the company Heeney Capital, with support from the Venezuelan Corporation of Guayana and the Ministry of Ecological Mining Development and Basic Industries. Beyond the tonnage, what matters is the symbol: Venezuela’s basic industry reappears on a commercial route that had been closed for a decade.

The names sound like trading rooms in Geneva and London, but the deal lands directly in the pocket of whoever exchanges USDT for bolívares in Puerto Ordaz, Maracaibo, or Caracas. Bloomberg revealed that **Mercuria Energy Group and Glencore** are holding separate talks with the Executive Branch to get into the operation of **Venalum**, the country’s largest aluminum smelter, located in the industrial hub of Puerto Ordaz, Bolívar state.
Venalum, controlled by the State, once had installed capacity of about **430,000 metric tons per year of primary aluminum**. Today it produces only a fraction of that, battered by years without investment, power outages, grid failures, and an industrial decline that has already lasted more than a decade. The fact that two of the world’s biggest commodity traders sit down at the table is no small matter.

📊 A firm nobody had heard of is now negotiating with Caracas
Bloomberg this week revealed a name that meant nothing in the mining world: Heeney Capital. It is a private New York firm with a website visible only to registered investors. In just a few months, it went from submitting brief proposals to Washington officials to playing a central role in the Trump administration’s effort to reopen Venezuela’s raw materials sector.
Its cofounders, Henry Heeney (38) and Sean Pi (36), met as analysts at Evercore and started their own business by buying early-stage mineral deposits. Before landing in Venezuela, they had already cofounded Mayfair Gold, which has a deposit in Canada, and Siguiri Gold in Guinea. None of that made them well known. What put them on the map was the first shipment of about 15,000 tons of aluminum from the country’s largest smelter, Venalum, sold to U.S. manufacturers alongside Mercuria Energy Group.

📊 A shipment that breaks years of commercial silence
Venezuela is preparing to move 15,000 tons of aluminum destined for the United States, in what would be the first shipment of that metal to U.S. territory in years. The material would have been produced by Venalum and would ship under an agreement with Mercuria Energy Group Ltd. and Heeney Capital, according to Bloomberg Line reports cited by national business press. Sources linked to the deal even suggest that the announcement could coincide with an energy summit between the two countries.