Venezuelan Oil Revitalization: Paid For With Your Taxes
American oil executives have spent weeks protesting that spending their own assets to revitalize Venezuela’s oil industry is too costly. Estimates of capital needs for some existing oil fields range from $10 billion to $20 billion, while developing new fields could take up to $100 billion over a decade, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
That expense is so out of the question, said Darren Woods, chief executive of the nearly $550 billion ExxonMobil Corp., that it makes Venezuela “uninvestable,” he told Trump at a meeting with several oil majors, including Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Shell. It was a description multiple news outlets noted at the time without including Woods’s caveat that his assessment could change if the “commercial frameworks” and legal system were significantly altered, according to a transcript of his prepared remarks. Because it is currently uninvestable, he said, there “has to be durable investment protections, and there has to be a change to the hydrocarbon laws in the country.”
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“We’re confident that with this administration and President Trump working hand in hand with the Venezuelan government that those changes can be put in place,” Woods went on to say.
In other words, “Does Big Oil want to go into Venezuela? The answer is yes, if we guarantee the profits,” said Lukas Ross, deputy director of climate and energy at Friends of the Earth Action (FOE).
The Trump regime is already setting up a way to do that, said FOE Deputy Director Kate DeAngelis, with a meeting scheduled at the U.S. Export-Import Bank (EXIM) this week to start the process. Led by president and chairman John Jovanovic, the son-in-law of former talk show host and administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Mehmet Oz, the board will on Tuesday assess its schedule of countries and potentially decide to allow investments back into Venezuela, a spokesman for EXIM Bank confirmed in an email. The bank is currently barred from funding projects there.
“I am pretty cynical and feel this is probably the first step that they’re going to take to begin investment in the country,” DeAngelis said, adding that she expects the Trump regime to also rapidly lift sanctions to allow U.S. investments to flow.
The spokesman said the board “would hold its routine weekly meeting … Tuesday as part of its regular schedule!” He said members would review its CLS, or country limitation schedule, as a routine process undertaken several times a year: “This CLS is a normal, recurring administrative review—so nothing out of the ordinary!” He did not respond to a question by deadline asking whether members would consider Venezuela, but after publication, the spokesman insisted that Venezuela is not on the agenda.
DONALD TRUMP EXECUTED A COUP IN VENEZUELA in the middle of the night on January 3. The U.S. military bombed the country, killing at least 100 people including civilians, set off explosions to smash through the compound where President Nicolás Maduro was hiding with his wife Cilia Flores, dragged them out bleeding and bruised, and flew them to New York City. They’re now in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal jail so squalid and deadly that some judges refuse to send people there.
Trump’s coterie insisted that the extraordinary rendition was to stop the flow of drugs into the United States. But Trump himself has said plainly that it was for the oil. In fact, Trump has already sold an initial batch of Venezuelan oil for $500 million, and has made plans to block international bondholders from any claims to it, while dubiously keeping the proceeds in offshore bank accounts, including one main one in Qatar.
But that trickle of oil is nothing compared to what can potentially be produced in the country if large oil interests are enticed back.
Reports describing the skepticism and hesitancy of oil and gas industry executives don’t show the full picture. Executives have long wanted access to Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, which internal reports from the country claim are the world’s largest at more than 300 billion barrels. And executives discussed their wish for it immediately before and after Trump’s January 3 coup.
In October, for example, weeks before Trump kidnapped Maduro, Valero Energy Chief Operating Officer Gary Simmons responded in an earnings call to an analyst’s question about “the Venezuela certainty,” saying that the company does “have Venezuelan barrels back in the mix, which is helping.” He also noted that naphtha, a chemical his company makes, is “going back to Venezuela as diluent,” another source of revenue, juiced further because Russia is no longer making as much as it used to.
The type of oil produced in Venezuela is heavy crude, so thick that it must be diluted with chemicals like naphtha so that it can flow through pumps and pipelines. Any company making such diluents stands to benefit from Venezuelan oil production.
Phillips 66 CEO Mark Lashier put a finer point on it three days after Trump abducted Maduro. “Ultimately, there’s going to be more naphtha requirements. We’ve got opportunities to export [diluents] back into Venezuela if that opportunity exists. And longer-term, what you see is the potential for growth. Venezuela was producing three million barrels a day of heavy crude,” he said at the January 6 Goldman Sachs Energy, CleanTech and Utilities Conference.
Overall, Lashier said, more Venezuelan oil in the U.S. would be “constructive both for our Gulf Coast refining capabilities, as well as our mid-continent refineries,” and lauded the “opportunity for Venezuela to return back into the capitalist fold.”
Gulf Coast refineries were set up to handle heavy Venezuelan crude decades ago. So if more is pumped out of the ground there, more will be sent to refineries in the U.S. Those refineries are currently managing by refining heavy crude from Canada, and to a lesser extent Mexico.
While larger oil companies are holding out for guarantees, smaller oil firms are already eager to jump back into Venezuela, according to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. “I can tell you that independent oil companies and individuals, wildcatters, [our] phones are ringing off the hook. They want to get to Venezuela yesterday,” Bessent told the Economic Club of Minnesota on January 8. One former Chevron executive claims to be raising a $2 billion fund to develop oil projects in the country.
But it’s unclear whether those companies and financiers have enough capital resources to actually make a go of it in Venezuela. The bigger players certainly do, but they want the Trump administration to make it a can’t-lose situation. Some observers believe they will.
“Just because there’s a childishness to the way this is presented and talked about doesn’t mean these companies aren’t going to profit handsomely,” Ross said. “The stupidity and brutality of this intervention won’t stop it from being profitable to Big Oil.”
EXIM IS THE GOVERNMENT’S EXPORT CREDIT AGENCY, founded in 1934 to help U.S. industries rebuild following the Great Depression and compete in global markets. It is meant to boost U.S. goods and services abroad by giving taxpayer money to companies, ostensibly small businesses. But for decades, its top recipient has been Boeing, the nearly $200 billion weapons manufacturer. Last year, for example, the bank allocated $1 billion to support the export of Boeing aircraft; its infamous nickname is “the Bank of Boeing.”
EXIM also routinely gives money to major oil interests, such as the September 2025 transaction approving a $500 million guarantee to the nearly $74 billion Schlumberger Technology Corporation of Houston, Texas, and others, for an oil and gas field project in Bahrain. “EXIM is strengthening the nation’s energy dominance while continuing its mission to support Ameria’s [sic] economic security,” a press release about the transaction said.
It awarded a $526 million loan agreement to ExxonMobil in 2024 for a giant gas project in Guyana. The year before, it approved a second $90 million for a Freeport LNG project.
This year, Jovanovic said that EXIM Bank is “back in a big way, and it’s open for business,” with plans to invest $100 billion in service of Trump’s energy domination plans. In comparison, the bank approved just $8.7 billion for the year ending in September, the month Jovanovic was appointed.
There’s scant proof Americans will see any returns. “This is incredibly risky, there’s a good chance we’ll lose that money,” DeAngelis said. “If you start investing in Venezuela, the chance those loans won’t get repaid is pretty dang high so that’s just money that would go out the door.”
Earlier this month, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) introduced a bill that would bar the regime from using taxpayer money to reimburse oil companies for their investment in Venezuela. The No Taxpayer Funds for Corporate Investment in Venezuelan Oil Act would prohibit reimbursements from the Treasury and offshore accounts controlled by the U.S. But the bill has an infinitesimal chance of passing. And it makes no mention of the EXIM Bank.
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