America Wants a Stake in Venezuela's Oil

The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve hasn't been this thin in forty years. That single fact explains why, eight months after American special forces hauled Nicolás Maduro out of Venezuela in handcuffs, the Trump administration is now negotiating for something Washington has never had: a direct ownership stake in the ground beneath Venezuela's oil.

Two U.S. officials told Axios on Thursday that talks with Caracas's interim government have moved from concept to structure. The fields under discussion hold roughly 90 billion barrels of proven reserves — a deal that would more than double U.S. oil reserves by drawing from a country that has the world's largest proven reserves. One official put it bluntly: "Calling this deal huge would be an understatement. It is massive."

This is not a header on a press release. It is a bet that the United States can convert geology it does not currently control into barrels it can call its own, at the exact moment the Strait of Hormuz has turned every barrel elsewhere into a political liability. Adding pressure to get the deal signed are the wars in Iran and Ukraine, which have disrupted global oil supplies and raised prices, while the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve sits at a 40-year low. Crude markets have taken notice: WTI futures settled at $83.55/bbl Thursday, up +2.00%, while Brent closed at $89.59/bbl, up +2.47%, according to market data.

Not the whole pie, just the richest slice

The negotiators aren't carving up all of Venezuela's reserves — the discussions involve more than a dozen productive oil fields, not all of Venezuela's 300 billion barrels of proven reserves. What makes the target list politically convenient is who used to hold it. The fields in question, which have 90 billion barrels of proven reserves, used to be controlled by former Venezuelan insiders — including some who've been indicted — as well as interests once tied to Chinese state-backed entities, according to Axios. In other words, Washington isn't just chasing barrels. It's reclaiming assets from a Chavista patronage network and, in the same stroke, elbowing Beijing out of a country China spent two decades cultivating as a client.

The mechanics being discussed would keep Caracas nominally in the game. In return for giving the U.S. an ownership stake that would more than double its oil reserves, private companies, including American firms, would develop the fields and provide oil revenue to the Venezuelan government. It's a structure that lets Venezuela's interim government claim it kept sovereignty over its patrimony while handing Washington the equity.

The politics behind it run deeper than energy policy. Trump began privately discussing ways to have an ownership stake in Venezuelan oil fields even before he authorized the Jan. 3 capture of Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro, who faces narco-terrorism charges in a Manhattan courtroom. The negotiating table now includes Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Venezuela's acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, with deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller playing what officials describe as a substantial role, and Energy Secretary Chris Wright reportedly weighing a trip to Caracas as early as next week.

A rig count that tells the real story

Here is the friction the press releases won't mention: Venezuela's oil sector is still a shell of what it once was. Vice President Rodríguez claimed this week that production has climbed past 1.23 million barrels a day, the highest since 2019, though independent trackers put the real figure closer to 1.1 to 1.2 million, according to reporting collected by the Rio Times. Either number is a fraction of the roughly 3 million barrels a day Venezuela pumped in the early 2000s, and further still from the 3.7 million-barrel peak it hit in 1970.

Rystad Energy has laid out what it would actually take to close that gap: pushing output much beyond 1.4 million barrels a day would require sustained investment of $8 billion to $9 billion a year through 2040, alongside a wholesale overhaul of Venezuela's hydrocarbon law and PDVSA's governance. Chevron is already grinding through repairs at the Petropiar upgrader, and Hunt Oil and SLB signed production contracts with Caracas earlier this month to work mature fields in the east. None of that rebuilds a national oil industry overnight. Owning a stake in decayed infrastructure is not the same as owning flowing barrels.

The backdrop makes the risk worth taking, from Washington's vantage point. Reuters reported this week that OPEC+ has lost its grip on the market it once steered — its share of global output has slid from about 40% of global oil output in July, down from more than 48% before the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran in late February — as the Hormuz blockade neuters the cartel's ability to actually deliver the barrels it announces. In a world where Gulf supply is hostage to a closed strait, Western Hemisphere crude that answers to nobody's blockade looks less like a business deal and more like insurance.

Whether Caracas signs anything resembling what Washington wants is still an open question; officials cautioned to Axios that details remain unsettled and no timetable exists. But the direction of travel is unmistakable. For the first time since Hugo Chávez nationalized the industry two decades ago, the United States isn't just buying Venezuelan oil. It's negotiating to own the wells.