The White House has published the terms of its Venezuela oil deal: North American Blue Energy Partners gets a 100-year lease on 17 oilfields, the United States takes a 35 percent equity stake in the corporate parent, and Washington gets a guaranteed 20 percent of the oil produced plus a right of first refusal to buy all remaining output. Trump says ExxonMobil is going back in.
Who Gets the Oil
The fact sheet released late Monday puts hard numbers on the umbrella agreement that Caracas and Washington announced on Friday. Seventeen Venezuelan oilfields, holding about 65 billion barrels of reserves, are being folded into a deal that hands the United States a 35 percent equity stake in the corporate parent company, a guaranteed 20 percent of the oil produced, and first refusal on everything else. That’s not a partnership in any ordinary sense. It’s a state-backed claim on extraction, dressed up in the language of investment.
The Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital would use “penny warrants” — instruments that give the government equity without significant upfront capital. The machinery of empire doesn’t even need to pay full price to get a seat at the table. It just writes the rules, then calls it strategy.
Venezuela’s interim president Delcy Rodríguez negotiated the deal with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The Department of Energy was excluded from that phase. A signing ceremony is expected in Caracas later this week. Chevron, GE Vernova, India’s ONGC, Italy’s Eni and Colombia’s GeoPark are also on track to announce projects. Total output under the agreement should grow to as much as 1.5 million barrels a day. Venezuela currently pumps roughly 900,000.
The Bosses Talk Big
“We have Exxon going in, we have Chevron going in, we have our big oil companies going in, and everybody’s bidding,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday. The United States, he added, is already taking out “millions and millions of barrels of oil” for refineries in Texas and Louisiana. “We’re making a fortune, and they’re making a fortune.”
That’s the whole arrangement in one breath. The refineries, the profits, the bidding war, the state seal of approval. Ordinary people in Venezuela and the United States don’t appear in that sentence except as the ones who live with the consequences.
An ExxonMobil return would be a striking reversal. The company left Venezuela after Hugo Chávez nationalised its assets in 2007, the second expropriation in its history there. In January, chief executive Darren Woods called the country “uninvestable” under current legal conditions. Trump answered that he was “probably inclined to keep Exxon out”. The company sent a technical team to assess fields in March and has said little since. On Monday it declined to comment. ConocoPhillips is still owed roughly US$12 billion from the same nationalisation era. It said its decisions would depend on factors including policy stability.
Who Pays for the Deal
Chevron is in a different position. It never left Venezuela. It produces about a quarter of the country’s output through joint ventures. And it is negotiating to add at least one block in the Orinoco Belt, the vast extra-heavy crude region. The deal’s architecture keeps the extraction running while the companies and governments sort out who gets what slice of the spoils.
NABEP was previously owned by US oil trader Harry Sargeant. Today it is controlled by Alejandro Betancourt, a Venezuelan businessman. US and European authorities have investigated him over past dealings with Venezuelan officials. He has never been charged and has denied the allegations. The company currently produces about 170,000 barrels a day and has been a PDVSA partner for years. It says it aims to pass one million barrels a day. Under the new structure it receives 14 contracts. These include fields previously operated by Chinese companies and a Russian firm.
That choice of partner is the industry’s central unease. Executives negotiating their own contract migrations “do not want to be at the same table” as Betancourt, one participant in the preparations told Reuters. And the 35 percent US stake means Washington itself becomes a shareholder-competitor. “You would need a sizable amount of investment and expertise from companies like Exxon or ConocoPhillips,” said Alejo Czerwonko, chief investment officer for emerging markets at UBS. “How do you attract these companies to the country?”
What They Call Oversight
Venezuela’s hydrocarbons law allows only two production models: joint ventures and production-sharing contracts. It is unclear which one NABEP will use. Lawyers warn the pact could end up in court. They point to its 100-year duration, the lack of approval by other institutions in either country, and the absence of a competitive selection process. A recent reform removed the National Assembly’s mandatory oversight of energy contracts marked as being in the national interest. So the full text may never be published.
That’s the quiet part, really. The contract can stretch for a century, skip meaningful oversight, and still be sold as normal governance. The people who live under it get the bill. The people who sign it get the leverage.
Part of the American 20-percent output right is earmarked for the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve. That emergency stockpile sits in salt caverns in Texas and Louisiana. It held 289.7 million barrels in mid-August — 41 percent of capacity and the lowest level since 1983. Trump has promised the refill will begin “very soon”. He also says Venezuelan supply will bring down US gasoline prices, without giving a timeline. Caracas says the state will receive about US$19 per barrel and US$209 billion in taxes over 25 years. With Brent back above US$90 after renewed US-Iran strikes, every barrel matters more — for both treasuries.