The Hole in Donald Trump’s Venezuelan Oil Strategy
Jarrod Agen, the head of President Donald Trump’s National Energy Dominance Council, was in a celebratory mood. Just after one o’clock on April 30th, he landed in Caracas, Venezuela, on the first direct commercial flight to arrive from the United States since 2019. Only a few months before Agen’s trip, the Venezuelan government had accused the U.S. of orchestrating an imperialist scheme to plunder its resources. Now regime officials waited patiently on the tarmac as the plane carrying Agen’s delegation passed under the streams of a water salute and rolled to a stop. The pilots leaned out of the windows of the cockpit, unfurling American and Venezuelan flags for the cameras. Sporting a dark suit and gold-framed aviators, Agen descended the air stairs with a confident smile. “President Trump is a man of action,” he said. “We are moving at Trump speed to get things done.”
Since the day that Trump intervened in Venezuela, the President has been blunt about his motives. “We’re in the oil business,” he said, just after announcing the capture of the country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro. Venezuela has some of the world’s largest proven oil reserves, and U.S. companies once ran extensive operations there. But the regime had pushed almost all of these businesses out years ago, and Trump was eager to facilitate their return. “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies—the biggest anywhere in the world—go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, and start making money for the country.” The U.S. took control of Venezuela’s oil exports, and officials were dispatched to Caracas to broker deals with the regime.
Agen, who had visited Trump in the Oval Office just before his trip, had brought along representatives from oil companies seeking to invest in the country. He planned to meet Venezuela’s interim leader, Delcy Rodríguez, for lunch to discuss some of the deals that his boss was “very excited about.” Before their meeting, he was escorted into a hall where a guestbook lay open to a blank page, a portrait of Maduro wearing the Presidential sash hanging conspicuously above it. Unfazed, Agen bent over to sign the book. “Drill Baby Drill!” he wrote.
Venezuela’s oil industry has been under state control for decades. By welcoming foreign investment, Rodríguez was trying to distance herself from her predecessor’s failures. The country had spiraled under Maduro’s leadership: the economy shrank by three-fourths, inflation skyrocketed, and about twenty-five per cent of the population fled Venezuela. “If Rodríguez wants to save the Bolivarian revolution, she has to use this—whatever time frame Rubio and Trump are going to give her—to deliver the goods economically in Venezuela to win back the population,” a former U.S. senior official told me.
During her time as the country’s Vice-President, Rodríguez came to oversee the state-run oil company, P.D.V.S.A. Under Maduro, corruption inside the organization was rampant: shell companies linked to the President stole billions of dollars’ worth of exports, and large sums of money vanished from P.D.V.S.A.’s coffers. When Maduro took office, in 2013, Venezuela was producing more than two million barrels of oil per day. But, under his tenure, production tanked: by 2020, Venezuela’s production levels had dipped below four hundred thousand barrels.
Rodríguez didn’t root out the organization’s dysfunctions, but, in her dealings with Americans, she succeeded in casting herself as a more reliable interlocutor than those who came before her. Chevron, which has been operating in Venezuela for decades, worked directly with Rodríguez as it increased its production in the country during the Biden Administration. “When P.D.V.S.A. elements tried to run their skimming operations, Chevron would go to Delcy, and she would shut that shit down,” the U.S. official said. “There’s a lot of belief among people in the oil sector that they can do deals with Delcy Rodríguez, and she will deliver on what she says.”
Trump has said that he expects to see at least a hundred billion dollars in investments flow into the country. In the months since his Administration rolled back long-standing sanctions, Venezuela’s ten-year sovereign bond has soared, and investors have flocked to Caracas with the zeal of bargain hunters at a flea market. The U.S. has imported roughly a hundred million barrels of oil, worth an estimated eight billion dollars, from the country. “When you lose eighty-five per cent of your G.D.P., there’s a big opportunity,” James Story, a former American Ambassador to Venezuela, said. “That means that there’s nowhere to go but up.”
Still, experts have cast doubt on the long-term viability of the Administration’s efforts in Venezuela. “A lot of people are saying that perhaps we did everyone a favor by getting rid of Maduro, because there was a level of pragmatism outside of him, but an inability to act because he made all the decisions,” Story said. “That doesn’t necessarily mean that Delcy is a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist who was just waiting for her moment.” Story noted that Rodríguez’s political ascendancy happened under Maduro. “For thirteen years, she was part of the beggaring of the nation,” he said. “Is she not somehow responsible for the outcome?”
Like many observers, Story believes that Venezuela’s oil industry will not recover unless there is a change in leadership. Rodríguez remains deeply unpopular in Venezuela; the opposition figure María Corina Machado still maintains support among huge swaths of the population. “The same institutions—and many of the same individuals—that presided over the country’s economic and institutional collapse remain in power today,” Luis Pacheco, a Venezuelan engineer who spent sixteen years at P.D.V.S.A., said.
The Trump Administration’s plan for Venezuela has three phases: stabilization, recovery, and transition. Pacheco insisted that recovery could not take place without transition. Although Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that the phases might overlap, Trump has shown little interest in promoting an election in Venezuela. “It strains belief to think that those who dismantled the country’s institutional framework will now be the ones to rebuild it,” Pacheco said.
When Ricardo Rausseo, a Venezuelan businessman who has been living in Texas for almost eight years, heard that Maduro was gone, he was exultant. An engineer by training, Rausseo had co-founded a contracting business when the Venezuelan oil industry was booming. For years, he oversaw maintenance at the nation’s largest refineries and worked for some of the biggest names in the industry. “Oil runs through my veins,” he told me. “A refinery does for me what a Victoria’s Secret model does for everyone else.”
Venezuela mainly produces the type of heavy oil that refineries across the U.S. Gulf Coast are designed to process. In the early twentieth century, when vast deposits of oil were found in the country’s northwest, Dutch, British, and American companies seized on the opportunity to develop and profit from the country’s nascent industry. Before long, Venezuela became one of the world’s leading producers of oil. In 1975, government authorities moved to nationalize the country’s oil industry; P.D.V.S.A. came to oversee every step of the process.
When Hugo Chávez was elected, in 1998, oil accounted for most of the country’s export revenue. The socialist President tightened government control over the industry and pushed thousands of employees, including geologists and engineers, out of P.D.V.S.A. Rausseo still remembers the day when officials mandated workers at the company to wear red—the color of Chávez’s party. The regime also exerted near-total control over staffing decisions. “We no longer had the freedom to hire our own people,” Rausseo said. “We had to work through a system they built specifically to reward those who voted for them.”
Over time, graft and mismanagement came to hobble the industry. Rausseo was expected to fill openings for jobs such as crane operators with people who had never set foot in a refinery. Millions of dollars’ worth of contracts went unpaid. Agreements meant to last decades became a dead letter. Chávez insisted that foreign operators cede majority control of their operations to P.D.V.S.A.; when oil giants like ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil objected, the government expropriated their assets.
In 2018, Rausseo ended his last contract with P.D.V.S.A., for a seven-mile underwater pipe designed to feed oil tankers. “It was a slow, grinding decline—each day worse than the last—until finally, we hit a wall,” he said. It became clear to him that no one would be spared from the country’s downward spiral. He abandoned operations with a multimillion-dollar debt from P.D.V.S.A.
Over the past couple of months, Rausseo has been in touch with business owners who, like him, are thinking about going back. Word spread around that the regime was looking into ways to service the debts of businesses willing to partner with American companies in Venezuela. Industry leaders were considering their options, too. Chevron had vowed to grow its presence on the ground and increase its production in the country by about fifty per cent. Exxon initially was unwilling to entertain the idea of returning, but later dispatched negotiators to meet with Rodríguez’s team and inspect different sites, including one that it formerly operated. “It’s a country with an immense untapped potential,” Francisco Monaldi, the director of Rice University’s Latin America Energy Program, said. “Although the infrastructure is deteriorated and there are many issues to address, it remains an opportunity unlike almost any other in the world.”
Rausseo had seen these opportunities up close, but he had also witnessed the industry’s implosion. Like many people, he was having trouble shaking off his suspicions of the regime. So far, most investments in Venezuela are in existing oil sites—brownfields, in industry parlance. Investors with a high-risk threshold, particularly from Texas, have been jumping at those opportunities, Monaldi said. “If you run the numbers, you could recoup your investment in about a year,” he added. But no one was counting on these deals to revive Venezuela’s oil industry or bring in the hundred billion dollars that Trump repeatedly cited.
Venezuela’s institutions have been in the regime’s grip for so long that they have lost all credibility. There are no checks and balances; no independent agency to auction off and assign oil licenses. According to Monaldi, P.D.V.S.A. controls about a quarter of the country’s oil production; people with connections to the regime hold a comparable share. The other half is split into joint-venture arrangements. Chevron oversees twenty-five per cent of the national output. “The remainder? It’s basically Russia and China, through their respective state-owned energy companies,” Monaldi said. “If you add up the shares belonging to the regime’s associates with the Russian and Chinese stakes, you’re looking at well over forty per cent of Venezuela’s total production—and that is a genuine hot potato for Washington.”
Monaldi has been keeping an eye out for investments in greenfields—projects involving entirely new infrastructure, which are costlier and require a commitment over the long term. So far, none have materialized. At Washington’s insistence, Rodríguez’s government passed a new hydrocarbon law, which gives private companies greater autonomy to operate oil fields and sell the crude. But too many questions remain around Venezuela’s fiscal terms and how contract disputes might be solved. The C.E.O. of ConocoPhillips, Ryan Lance, has said that Rodríguez’s legislation is “woefully inadequate.” A more pressing issue for his company is whether the regime will pay back the twelve billion dollars it owes ConocoPhillips since expropriating its assets, in 2007.
“In the absence of institutions, everything must go through one person,” Luisa Palacios, a Venezuelan expert at Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy, said. “Anything that hinges on a single individual carries exceptionally high risk.” With time, investors would adjust their position depending on how Venezuela’s risk profile changed. “To properly assess that level of risk, you need to understand what is subject to change—politically and legally,” Palacios added. “The central question for any investor is this: How confident can I be that, three years from now, in the absence of an election, Venezuela won’t be dragged back into a sanctions regime? There is also the rule-of-law question: what guarantees do I have that my assets won’t be seized again, or that the rules won’t be rewritten again?”
Pacheco compared the plight of Venezuela’s oil industry to that of a family dealing with a tangled inheritance. “Imagine there’s a room; in that room, there are boxes filled with your grandmother’s jewels. If you get your hands on those jewels, you can walk them straight to Sotheby’s or Christie’s and turn a profit. It’s a quick win. Except, who has the key to the room? Nobody seems to know. Where’s the door? Also unclear. What does it take to get in? No one can say.” He went on, “President Trump’s underlying vision is right. Venezuela can be a major player in the global oil markets. The country sits in the right hemisphere to serve U.S. interests. But the key to the vault is in Venezuelan hands.”
Venezuela’s oil revenues are currently being held by the U.S. Treasury, but neither country has disclosed how much money has flowed into the accounts, or what it has been used for. Since Maduro’s capture, there have been few tangible changes in people’s lives; the official minimum wage has remained frozen at a hundred and thirty bolívares per month, or less than a dollar, and people have been forced to rely on government-issued bonuses. The gap between Trump’s economic ambitions and the reality on the ground gets wider every day.
“We’re falling back into the same trap the oil industry has fallen into in the past,” Rausseo said. For all the talk of revamping Venezuela’s oil infrastructure or improving the fiscal regime, there seemed to be no concern for the fact that the country has been ruined. “Hunger doesn’t wait,” he added. “When eighty per cent of your population lives in poverty, you cannot look those people in the eye and say, ‘Hold on, we’ll first invest in these oil wells, then the companies will pay their royalties and taxes, and the government—whoever that may be—will take that money, redistribute it, and create social programs.’ The urgency simply doesn’t allow for it.” In Rausseo’s view, the industry needed to seriously think about how to “sembrar el petróleo,” or sow the seeds of oil wealth.
Rodríguez had initially pledged transparency: she set up a government website, for everyone to see the country’s revenues. (Under her leadership, the government has sold oil to the U.S., Spain, and India.) But the only entry on the site was added in March: a sale of three hundred million dollars’ worth of oil. “This arrangement—total U.S. control over oil revenues—is simply not sustainable,” Pacheco said. The State Department had greenlit a disbursement of three billion dollars from the accounts and said that the accounting firm K.P.M.G. was auditing the money, but none of its reports had been made public, and little had been said about the Administration’s efforts to rein in corruption. In Pacheco’s view, this all posed a political conundrum: “If you hand everything Venezuela is producing to the Rodríguez regime, you’ll be left with almost no leverage over her administration. But, if you give too little, the government will not be able to stabilize the currency, tame inflation, and so forth. So, you end up engineering a crisis with the potential to erupt into a full-blown social uprising.”
Exactly how Venezuela might become a major player in the industry remains an open question. For now, the only consensus is that it will take time, and that too many variables are at play. Rodríguez’s dealings with the Trump Administration have come at a cost. “Everyone around her is watching her every move,” Benigno Alarcón, a leading political analyst in Venezuela, said. “This could fracture the government if others feel they are being left to fend for themselves.” Several voices within her party were already speaking out against the Trump Administration’s proconsul role. Last month, when the U.S. conducted military drills over Caracas, Rodríguez’s government downplayed them as “evacuation” exercises in the event of an emergency. The regime later circulated a video of Chávez that begins with the message, “He who knows how to master his emotions and bide his time, controls the fate of the battle.”
Rodríguez has reasons to play for time. Trump has only a few years left in office, and Republican prospects for the midterms are bleak. Democrats in Congress have voiced their intention to curtail the Administration’s operations in Venezuela. Lawmakers have already requested that the U.S. Government Accountability Office look into the Trump Administration’s handling of oil exports. As James Story, the U.S. diplomat, sees it, Rodríguez is counting on four things: a loss of interest on Trump’s part; his distraction with another foreign-policy issue; a Republican loss at the polls in November; and the end of Trump’s term. “Two of those things have happened,” Story said. “I haven’t seen any movement on anything when it comes to democracy, yet we send Cabinet secretaries to sit across the table with people who have twenty-five-million-dollar rewards on their heads. We have to start making the hard asks of this regime now, because I can tell you, hard things don’t get easier with time.”
The day after Agen landed in Caracas, a reporter called Rodríguez out: “A few questions from the press?” Smiling, Rodríguez deflected him: “No, I’m O.K., thank you.” The reporter persisted: “When do you expect to hold elections in Venezuela?” Rodríguez threw her hands in the air, making her way to the exit: “I don’t know,” she said, with a dry laugh. “Sometime.” ♦