Excerpt: Regime change in Venezuela could pave the way for the return of U.S. oil majors to the South American nation, which has the largest proven crude oil reserves in the world.
President Donald Trump called for U.S. oil companies to invest billions of dollars in Venezuela’s energy sector, hours after U.S. forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife.
“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies — the biggest anywhere in the world — go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure,” Trump said in a news conference Saturday from his Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida.
The oil majors have largely been silent since Maduro’s overthrow as the situation on the ground in Venezuela remains uncertain. But shares of Chevron, Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips are rising as investors bet that the three largest U.S. oil companies will cash in after the U.S. military action.
Venezuela’s oil reserves are estimated at 303 billion barrels or about 17% of the global total, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The country’s production peaked at 3.5 million barrels per day in the late 1990s but has declined significantly since then, according to energy consulting firm Kpler. Venezuela’s production currently stands at around 800,000 bpd, Kpler data shows.
Its reserves, located mostly in the Orinoco Belt in the eastern part of the country, are extra-heavy crude oil that require a greater level of technical expertise to extract, according to the EIA.
