President Donald Trump has made it clear: His imaginative and prescient for Venezuela’s future includes the US benefiting from its oil.
“We’re going to have our very massive United States oil corporations—the most important wherever on the planet—go in, spend billions of {dollars}, repair the badly damaged infrastructure, the oil infrastructure,” the president informed reporters at a information convention Saturday, following the shocking capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his spouse.
However consultants warning that a lot of realities—together with worldwide oil costs and longer-term questions of stability within the nation—are prone to make this oil revolution a lot tougher to execute than Trump appears to suppose.
“The disconnect between the Trump administration and what’s actually happening within the oil world, and what American corporations need, is big,” says Lorne Stockman, an analyst with Oil Change Worldwide, a clear vitality and fossil fuels analysis and advocacy group.
Venezuela sits on a number of the largest oil reserves on the planet. However manufacturing of oil there has plummeted for the reason that mid Nineties, after President Hugo Chávez nationalized a lot of the business. The nation was producing just 1.3 million barrels of oil every day in 2018, down from a excessive of greater than 3 million barrels every day within the late Nineties. (The US, the highest producer of crude oil on the planet, produced a mean of 21.7 million barrels every day in 2023.) Sanctions positioned on Venezuela throughout the first Trump administration, in the meantime, have pushed manufacturing even additional down.
Trump has repeatedly implied that releasing up all that oil and growing manufacturing could be a boon for the oil and gasoline business—and that he expects American oil corporations to take the lead. This sort of considering—a pure offshoot of his “drill, child, drill” philosophy—is typical for the president. Considered one of Trump’s main critiques of the Iraq conflict, which he first voiced years earlier than he ran for workplace, was that the US didn’t “take the oil” from the area to “reimburse ourselves” for the conflict.
The president views vitality geopolitics “virtually just like the world is a Settlers of Catan board—you kidnap the president of Venezuela and, ipso facto, you now management all of the oil,” says Rory Johnston, a Canadian oil market researcher. “I do suppose he legitimately, to a level, believes that. It’s not true, however I believe that’s an essential body for the way he is justifying and driving the momentum of his coverage.”
Some Trump administration insurance policies that have been meant to spice up American oil and gasoline have really damage the business. US oil producers have repeatedly voiced issues about how tariffs and a volatile market have contributed to a dramatic decline in world oil costs, which fell 20 p.c in 2025—the biggest losses since 2020. Oil and gasoline corporations, like most huge industries with a variety of capital invested in infrastructure, worth long-term political and monetary stability. Any extra huge, unpredictable shakeups—in provide, regulatory environments, tariffs, or in any other case—couldn’t come at a worse time for American oil.
“Proper now the oil market’s considerably oversupplied,” Stockman says. “That is hurting American corporations. The very last thing they need is for an enormous oil reserve to all of the sudden be opened up.”
Quite a few each short- and long-term selections may have an effect on how the US invasion of Venezuela performs out for American oil. First there’s the query of what occurs to all of the oil Venezuela is at the moment sitting on. Over the previous few months, the administration has considerably ramped up sanctions and blockades on Venezuela, creating an enormous glut of oil that hasn’t been capable of finding its approach overseas.
