Yee haw.
The Trump administration is asking U.S. oil companies if they’re interested in returning to Venezuela once leader Nicolás Maduro is gone, four people familiar with the discussions told POLITICO.
And so far, the answer is a hard “no.”
The administration’s outreach to the industry, previously unreported, is the latest sign the White House is dreaming of a post-Maduro future for Venezuela — and how the world’s oil markets are both helping and hindering that goal.
The markets, glutted with supply and with prices at nearly five-year lows, are giving President Donald Trump an unusually free hand to tighten military pressure on the South American OPEC member, much the way they largely shrugged off U.S. and Israeli missile strikes on Iran in June. But those prices are also way too low to entice companies to take the risk of pouring huge investments into the crumbling Venezuelan oil facilities that former strongman Hugo Chávez seized decades ago, industry officials and analysts said.
The U.S. benchmark oil price was around $56 a barrel Wednesday afternoon, the lowest since January 2021. That means Trump has only limited reason to worry that an attack on Venezuela would send gasoline prices spiraling upward— but it also means U.S. oil companies have better investment options elsewhere.
“There has been the genesis of an outreach with the industry on the potential of reentering Venezuela,” one person familiar with the discussion said. “But frankly, there’s not a lot of interest from the industry, in light of lower oil prices and more attractive fields globally.”
The administration has only recently started initiating the outreach to the industry, two of the people familiar with the efforts said.
“It’s not as straightforward to convince companies to risk capital in an uncertain political environment,” one of those people said. Three of the people who spoke to POLITICO were granted anonymity to describe internal discussions.
The U.S. effort, led by the State Department, has also gotten assistance from Evanan Romero, a former executive at the Venezuelan state-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela who now works as a consultant in Houston, a person in the industry said.
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The first Trump administration placed sanctions on Venezuela, including its oil industry. Years of sanctions, insufficient investment and political turmoil have since turned what had been a top oil-producing country with vast deposits into one that industry representatives have called a junkyard.
Still, reviving Venezuela’s oil production may not be as easy as some in the administration think, analysts said.
Fernando Ferreira, director of the Geopolitical Risk Service at Rapidan Energy Group, said oil majors are likely to be “cautious before jumping in with both feet as the administration maybe hopes that they would.”
“The companies that have been burned once are going to be careful about going back in — they have to justify to shareholders why it is different now,” Ferreira said. “There’s probably going to be a gap between a transition and a rush for investments going to Venezuela.”
But he noted the rush of interest from companies in returning to Venezuela after the Biden administration began softening sanctions in 2022. “There’s definitely a latent interest in Venezuela,” he said.
In other news:
New York Times:
Nicolás Maduro, the leader of Venezuela, ordered his navy to escort ships carrying petroleum products from port, risking a confrontation with the United States on the high seas as he defied President Trump’s declaration of a “blockade” aimed at the country’s oil industry.
Several ships sailed from Venezuela toward Asia with a Venezuelan naval escort between Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning, said three people familiar with the transits. None of the commercial vessels are on the list of sanctioned tankers the United States is threatening to target.
But the recent cascade of events, set off by the Trump administration’s seizure of a tanker last week and then by the president’s order of a partial “blockade” on Tuesday, increased the likelihood of a violent conflict.
NY Times today also had a fairly comical “Guest Essay” by Matthew Yglesias titled:
“Obama Supported It. The Left in Canada and Norway Does. Why Don’t Democrats?”
An ad for the oil industry saying all the good things Democrats want would happen faster if they’d Just Like The Fossil Industry.
I’ve never followed anything Yglesias ever did, I did see that he also wrote a book asserting that what our country needs is to have a population of one billion. So now I know I haven’t missed anything.
Here’s his piece – I’m having trouble figuring out of the Times is swinging right because they want to or because they feel it’s a good defensive move.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/18/opinion/democrats-liberals-oil-gas-industry.html
“I know you’re proud of yourself for catching that mouse, Whoopi, but I don’t want it.”