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

President Donald Trump was clear: his vision for The future of Venezuela implies that the United States is profiting from its oil.

“We’re going to ask our very large American oil companies – the largest in the world – to step in, spend billions of dollars, repair the badly damaged infrastructure, the oil infrastructure,” the president told reporters at a news conference Saturday, following the attack. Shocking capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife.

But experts warn that a number of realities – including international oil prices and questions of long-term stability at home – will likely make this oil revolution much more difficult to implement than Trump seems to think.

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

Venezuela has some of the largest oil reserves in the world. But oil production there has fallen since the mid-1990s, after President Hugo Chávez nationalized much of the industry. The country was just produce 1.3 million barrels of oil per day in 2018, compared to more than 3 million barrels per day in the late 1990s. (The United States, the world’s largest crude oil producer, produced on average 21.7 million barrels every day in 2023.) Meanwhile, sanctions imposed on Venezuela under the first Trump administration have caused production to decline even further.

Trump has repeatedly suggested that releasing all that oil and boosting production would be a boon for the oil and gas industry — and that he expects U.S. oil companies to take the lead. This kind of thinking – a natural outgrowth of his “drill, baby, drill” philosophy – is typical of the president. One of the Trumps hand reviews One of the main reasons for the Iraq War, which he first expressed years before running for office, was that the United States had not “taken the oil” from the region to “repay itself” for the war.

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