Venezuelans queue outside a polling station as they wait to cast their vote during regional elections in Caracas, Venezuela on October 15, 2017. Juan Barreto | AFP | Getty Images

Embattled Venezuela with its current political and economic turmoil should be front and center for oil traders as we head into 2018, according to industry experts and political analysts. "The market is rebalancing, but there are still a number of producers that are poised for real challenges. I think Venezuela is the story we all have to watch in the first quarter of 2018 … We really have a country that is poised to go out of business," Helima Croft, head of global commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets, told CNBC Tuesday. On Sunday, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced that Manuel Quevedo, a former housing minister and major general in the National Guard (one of the country's armed forces), was to become the country's new oil minister and head of the state oil company PDVSA. The move comes after the erratic president — branded a "dictator" by the U.S. — gave his support to a dramatic purge of the company with the arrests of 50 employees since the summer. There has also been several senior executives detained at the company's U.S. refinery subsidiary CITGO, on various corruption and embezzlement charges.

The crackdown comes amid wider economic turmoil in Socialist-ruled Venezuela with the major oil-producing nation struggling with hyperinflation (estimated by Venezuela's opposition party to hit around 1,400 percent in 2018), recession, food shortages and attempts to restructure foreign debt in order to avoid a default. This has put its entire economy, including its nationalized oil industry that accounts for most of the country's export revenues, in jeopardy. Helima Croft echoed BP's Chief Executive Bob Dudley who told CNBC a few weeks ago that the OPEC member Venezuela was the biggest risk for the oil industry in 2018 and that the country was "defying economic gravity."

The future of PDVSA