President Donald Trump said Friday night that an agreement in Venezuela would give the United States a stake in the country’s vast oil reserves, but the White House has released little beyond a social media post and no text of any agreement has been made public. The deal was sold as a triumph. For everyone else, it’s a locked door.
Trump called it “THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY.” Yet the basic terms remain hidden, the private operator hasn’t been named, and neither side has explained who pays for the infrastructure, who takes the risk, or how the spoils are split. That’s how power likes it: loud on the announcement, silent on the details.
Who Gets the Oil
A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the deal gives the United States 55% effective output of the new private company, including an ownership stake and rights to buy oil at cost. The official said American purchases of the oil will go toward the U.S. strategic oil reserves along with the military. The official also said the company would be the second largest corporate holder of proven reserves after Saudi Aramco.
The U.S. government and an unnamed private operator in Venezuela formed a new company that was given the rights to untapped oil fields for 100 years. Rodríguez said the deal involves the development of 17 fields with a proven potential of 65 billion barrels. She said it could draw $100 billion in investment into Venezuela’s oil industry and yield over $209 billion in taxes for Caracas. Trump said the agreement was negotiated by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Rodríguez.
That’s a century-long lock on resources, handed down from above. The people living with the consequences get promises. The state and its private partners get leverage.
What They’re Calling Recovery
Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, said Saturday that the deal was a step toward economic recovery and would modernize the country’s oil industry. She said the oil reserves would “cease to be an inert, cold statistic and will instead become concrete solutions. Housing is one of them.” Speaking while touring reconstruction efforts after the deadly twin earthquakes that hit in late June, she said thousands of families were left homeless.
“What we are doing is for the development of the country, but above all, to serve the Venezuelan people, to provide them with more jobs, better wages, and access to public services such as water, electricity, hospitals, schools and adequate food,” she said.
Those are the words of the official line. They sit beside the reality that the agreement itself has not been made public, and the people most affected still don’t know the terms. The reconstruction tour, the oil deal, the promises of housing and public services — all of it runs through the same hierarchy, where decisions are made high up and sold downward as relief.
Who Pays, Who Waits
Many questions remain unanswered, including how soon the reserves could be drilled, who will pay to make it happen and who will cover necessary investments. The identity of the private operator has not been disclosed. It also remains unclear how the U.S. stake breaks down, including what portion comes from an ownership stake and what portion comes from the right to buy oil at cost. Neither side made clear who would pay for infrastructure investments or at what cost.
Trump said the deal would help lower gas prices for Americans, but experts said that was unlikely any time soon. Amy Myers Jaffe, director of the Energy, Climate Justice and Sustainability Lab at New York University, said the deal could be “helpful in the long run, but it’s not going to do anything to change the price of gasoline at the retail station for Labor Day weekend.” The average price of gas in the U.S. stood at about $4.08 a gallon on Saturday, according to AAA, compared with $3.20 at the same time last year.
Kevin Book, managing director at ClearView Energy Partners, said Venezuela has room to increase production, noting that it once produced more than 2.5 million barrels a day above current levels, but said investments of this scale don’t happen quickly. “It’s going to take time — many years — to deploy that much capital and produce the kind of incremental results that history suggests possible,” Book said.
So the pitch is immediate relief, but the machinery moves on a much slower clock. The costs land somewhere below the press release.
Backlash From Below
Some Venezuelans saw the deal as a betrayal of the government’s long-standing position that Venezuelan resources are for Venezuela and that leaders would not allow the U.S. government access to those resources. At a market in eastern Caracas on Saturday, Douglas Borjas said, “I think they’re doing it to cling to power.” He added, “It’s like, ‘I’m giving you a vast amount of petroleum as long as you leave me alone here in power.’” Borjas also said, “The Venezuelan people deserve better. Venezuela has resources that can be exploited, but for the benefit of the people, not for the benefit of the corrupt elite.”
Harvard University professor Ricardo Hausmann, a former Venezuelan planning minister, called it a “shameful deal.” He said on social media, “Venezuelans will not respect this illegitimate deal and no major US oil company will take it seriously because they know it will not last,” adding that Rodríguez “has no legitimacy or constitutional power to commit Venezuela to any such deal.”
Lawmakers from both parties quickly weighed in. Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, called it a historic deal that helps both countries. “If it were up to DC Democrats, Maduro would still be in power, Venezuelan oil would be going to China at half price, and the people of Venezuela would be getting robbed by a corrupt regime,” Moreno wrote on social media. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said Trump was always after Venezuela’s oil, calling it “corruption at epic scale.” He wrote, “Will prices come down for Americans? Who knows but likely not as much as Trump has forced them up thru his idiotic Iran War.” Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said Trump “put our service members at risk to get Venezuelan oil for his billionaire buddies.”
The deal has also drawn scrutiny over the scale of Venezuela’s reserves and the lack of public detail. A statement from Rodríguez said the agreement involves 17 fields with a proven potential of 65 billion barrels, while a U.S. official said the company would be the second largest corporate holder of proven reserves after Saudi Aramco. David Oxley, chief climate and commodities economist at Capital Economics, said that on its face the deal could double U.S. oil reserves and reduce dependence on crude oil from Canada and Mexico, but he cautioned that there are logistical hurdles and said the value of Venezuela’s reserves may have been exaggerated under former President Hugo Chavez. He said that even with legal and security guarantees, it is not clear U.S. oil companies would be eager to invest because there may be more enticing commercial opportunities elsewhere. Chevron, the only U.S. oil company actively producing in Venezuela, declined to comment, and Exxon Mobil also declined to comment.