Trump wants Venezuela’s oil. Obtaining it may not be so simple

President Donald Trump He’s made it clear: His vision for Venezuela’s future includes the United States benefiting from its oil.

“We are going to bring in the very large American oil companies — the largest anywhere in the world — to spend billions of dollars, repair the badly damaged infrastructure, the oil infrastructure,” the president told reporters at a news conference on Saturday, following the shock arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife.

But experts warn that a number of realities — including global oil prices and long-term stability issues in the country — are likely to make implementing this oil revolution much more difficult than Trump thinks.

“The disconnect between the Trump administration and what is actually happening in the oil world, and what American companies want, is enormous,” says Lorne Stockman, an analyst at Oil Change International, a clean energy and fossil fuel research and advocacy organization.

Venezuela sits on some of the world’s largest oil reserves. But oil production there has declined since the mid-1990s, after President Hugo Chavez nationalized much of the industry. The country was producing just 1.3 million barrels of oil per day in 2018, down from a high of more than 3 million barrels per day in the late 1990s. (The United States, the world’s largest crude oil producer, produced an average of 21.7 million barrels per day in 2023.) Meanwhile, sanctions imposed on Venezuela during the first Trump administration further reduced production.

Trump has repeatedly hinted that freeing up all this oil and increasing production would be a boon for the oil and gas industry, and that he expects American oil companies to take the lead. This kind of thinking — a natural offshoot of his “drill, baby, drill” philosophy — is typical of the president. One of Trump’s main criticisms of the Iraq War, which he first expressed years before he ran for office, was that the United States did not “take oil” from the region to “redeem ourselves” for the war.

Rory Johnston, a Canadian oil market researcher, says the president views energy geopolitics “almost as if the world were a board of directors for the settlers of Catan — you kidnap the president of Venezuela and, de facto, now control all the oil.” “I think he legitimately believes that, to some extent. It’s not true, but I think that’s an important framework for how he justifies and drives his policy momentum.”