“We will have our very large American oil companies – the largest in the world – step in, spend billions of dollars and fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure,” the president told reporters at a news conference on Saturday, following the shock arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife.
But experts warn that a number of realities — including international oil prices and the country’s longer-term stability issues — are likely to make this oil revolution much more difficult to implement than Trump seems to think.
“The gap between the Trump administration and what is really going on in the oil world and what American companies want is enormous,” said Lorne Stockman, an analyst at Oil Change International, a clean energy and fossil fuels research and advocacy group.
Venezuela has some of the largest oil reserves in the world. But oil production there has plummeted 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, down from a high of more than 3 million barrels per day in the late 1990s. (The US, the world’s largest producer of crude oil, produced on average 21.7 million barrels Any day in 2023.) Meanwhile, sanctions imposed on Venezuela during the first Trump administration have further reduced production.
Trump has repeatedly suggested that releasing all that oil and increasing production would be a boon to the oil and gas industry — and that he expects U.S. oil companies to lead the way. This kind of thinking – a natural outgrowth of his “drill, baby, drill” philosophy – is typical of the president. One from Trump hand reviews of the war in Iraq, which he first stated years before running for office, was that the US had not “taken the oil” out of the region to “pay ourselves back” for the war.
The president views energy geopolitics “almost as if the world were an administration of the Settlers of Catan: you kidnap the president of Venezuela and essentially you now control all the oil,” said Rory Johnston, a Canadian oil market researcher. “I think he rightly believes that to some extent. It’s not true, but I think that’s an important framework for how he justifies and directs the momentum of his policies.”
#Trump #Venezuelan #oil #easy