Washington casts its Venezuela oil arrangement as an energy-security play with huge upside; critics see a politically fragile deal built on an industry that will take years and billions of dollars to revive.

President Donald Trump announced an agreement to take control of access to 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil reserves, a volume larger than the United States’ estimated 46 billion barrels of proven reserves. Under the reported structure, Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, granted a private company a 100-year lease on prime fields, while the U.S. federal government would control 55% of the venture’s effective output through equity and production rights.¹

The arrangement would be unusual for Washington. The United States is the world’s largest oil producer but has no state-owned oil champion comparable to Saudi Aramco, Russia’s Rosneft or Brazil’s Petrobras. A U.S. official said the new company could become the world’s second-largest corporate holder of proven reserves, behind Aramco.¹

Rodríguez has presented the proposal as a route to capital, saying it would bring more than $100 billion in investment and generate $209 billion for Venezuela’s government.¹ The administration, meanwhile, says increased production could eventually help refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which stood at 289.7 million barrels — its lowest level since November 1982 — after an energy shock forced stockpile drawdowns.¹

But the timetable is the deal’s central weakness. Venezuelan output has fallen to about 1.1 million barrels a day from a peak of 3.5 million more than two decades ago. Restoring that capacity would require sustained investment and renewed confidence from companies whose assets were nationalized by previous governments. Chevron, Halliburton and Eni are among firms reported to be considering or discussing expanded activity.¹

Skeptic Dean Baker, a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, argued that any future democratic Venezuelan government would reject the arrangement: “the very first thing it will do is flush Trump’s deal down the toilet.”¹