Lake Maracaibo is rich in oil and gas resources and is known as the "oil lake". The first Spaniards who arrived used tar seeping from the lake to fill ship cracks. The Maracaibo oil field was discovered in 1914, the first oil well was constructed in 1917, and large-scale exploitation began in 1922. The oil fields are concentrated in the northeast and northwest of the lake, and the oil-producing layers are mainly Tertiary sandstone and Cretaceous limestone, with a hydrocarbon-bearing area of 1,300 square kilometers, mainly concentrated in the coastal waters 105 kilometers long and 32 kilometers wide in the east of the lake, the extracted oil accounts for 75% of Venezuela's total oil production.
