Name: Breaking down Trump’s plan for Venezuela’s oil
Uploaded: 2026-01-05T13:20:27.905Z
Duration: 4 min 29 s
Description: U.S. President Donald Trump wants to use American companies to get oil flowing in Venezuela and make everyone rich, but it’s likely not as easy as it sounds. CBC’s Eli Glasner breaks down the reality of Trump’s plan and how long it could take to amp up oil production.

U.S. President Donald Trump wants to use American companies to get oil flowing in Venezuela and make everyone rich, but it’s likely not as easy as it sounds. CBC’s Eli Glasner breaks down the reality of Trump’s plan and how long it could take to amp up oil production.

Washington

Donald Trump has presented a plan for the United States to take a leading role in managing Venezuela's oil industry, promising that American oil companies would invest billions of dollars and revitalize the sector without financial cost to the U.S. Trump claims profits would be used locally in Venezuela, and that the initiative would be beneficial for both countries.

Experts note that Venezuela holds the world's largest oil reserves, much of which is heavy and difficult to extract, and that the industry has suffered from years of underinvestment and nationalization policies. Analysts caution that foreign companies face significant financial risks due to past experiences and that restoring Venezuela's oil output will require more than promises, drawing comparisons to the long-term challenges seen in Iraq.

Breaking down Trump’s plan for Venezuela’s oil

For the moment, this is the Trump plan. America running Venezuela and its lucrative oil industry. We'll run it properly. We'll run it professionally. We'll have the greatest oil companies in the world going in and invest billions and billions of dollars and take out money, use that money in Venezuela. And the president insists there's no downside for America. It won't cost us anything because the money coming out of the ground is very substantial. Oil analyst Roy Johnston is bullish on Venezuela's long term future. Venezuela has enormous resource potential. Emphasis on the long term. This is a five plus year story at the least. There's a lot of oil in the ground, according to associate political science professor Pasha Madhavi. Venezuela has some of the world's largest oil reserves, about 300 billion barrels. That would put it above pretty much anywhere else on the planet. But it's not just the amount of oil, but the kinds of oil that Venezuela is sitting on. Most of Venezuela's oil is heavy oil and something that's close to, you know, Alberta's tar sands. It's some of the dirtiest oil in the world. It's because it takes so much energy to get out of the ground. Often you have to inject steam just to lift the oil out. And of course, there's a lot of gas associated with that oil. At its height of production, Venezuela was producing over three million barrels a day. That was in the early 2000s. Now it's only producing about a third as much or about one percent of global oil production. In the mid 2000s, when President Hugo Chavez began accelerating the nationalization of industries, imposing punishing contracts on foreign oil companies, big names such as U.S. based Exxon Mobil left the country. So what does the oil industry look like today? Right now, it is quite expensive to extract some of those very, you know, heaviest oils that it has in the Orinoco belt, which is kind of straddling the Amazon rainforest. But of course, Venezuela has lots of other oil, including some heavier blends that are cheap to extract. While Trump talks about making the Venezuela oil industry great again. We're going to rebuild the oil infrastructure, which will cost billions of dollars. It'll be paid for by the oil companies directly. Not only are there major challenges. We're talking about decades and decades of underinvestment and assets that have essentially atrophied or ossified in place. They've slowly rotted down. But there's the question of the financial risks international companies would face. They've all been burned repeatedly by the Venezuelan government, both through Hugo Chavez into Maduro and kind of over the past decades. It's going to take not just Trump's kind of promise that they will be made whole, that they will be safe in their investments. It's going to take a visible and kind of credible track record. I wonder just how ready is Venezuela, even with American companies coming in to help to get that oil flowing? We don't have to look that far back in history to see how this may play out. It was only 23 years ago when the United States invaded Iraq and, you know, similar promises were made back then of trying to return on those spigots. Same story. You know, Saddam had really destroyed Iraq's oil industry, a lot of comparisons to him and Hugo Chavez, Maduro's predecessor. Fast forward, it's two decades plus. The oil industry in Iraq is only now really starting to be revitalized. And while Trump talks about American companies taking back Venezuelan oil. They're going to spend money. We're going to take back the oil that, frankly, we should have taken back a long time ago. There's little talk of elections. I wouldn't say this is unequivocally a war for oil, but there are a lot of signs. It's kind of hard to ignore the, quote unquote, muddy footprints of the oil industry. You know, The Wall Street Journal had reported that a number of major banks in finance years are headed down to Venezuela right now. So you can see the kind of fingerprints of how this administration, the Trump administration, may be trying to rework Venezuela's oil industry and try to do so in the favor of American and European oil companies.

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