\n<\/p>\n
President Donald Trump<\/span> has made it clear: His vision for Venezuela\u2019s future<\/a> involves the US profiting from its oil.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re going to have our very large United States oil companies\u2014the biggest anywhere in the world\u2014go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure,\u201d the president told reporters at a news conference Saturday, following the shocking capture of Venezuelan president Nicol\u00e1s Maduro<\/a> and his wife.<\/p>\n But experts caution that a number of realities\u2014including international oil prices and longer-term questions of stability in the country\u2014are likely to make this oil revolution much harder to execute than Trump seems to think.<\/p>\n “The disconnect between the Trump administration and what’s really going on in the oil world, and what American companies want, is huge,\u201d says Lorne Stockman, an analyst with Oil Change International, a clean energy and fossil fuels research and advocacy organization.<\/p>\n Venezuela sits on some of the largest oil reserves in the world. But production of oil there has plummeted since the mid 1990s, after President Hugo Ch\u00e1vez nationalized much of the industry. The country was producing just<\/a> 1.3 million barrels of oil each day in 2018, down from a high of more than 3 million barrels each day in the late 1990s. (The US, the top producer of crude oil in the world, produced an average of 21.7 million barrels<\/a> each day in 2023.) Sanctions placed on Venezuela during the first Trump administration, meanwhile, have driven production even further down.<\/p>\n Trump has repeatedly implied that freeing up all that oil and increasing production would be a boon for the oil and gas industry\u2014and that he expects American oil companies to take the lead. This kind of thinking\u2014a natural offshoot of his \u201cdrill, baby, drill\u201d philosophy\u2014is typical for the president. One of Trump\u2019s main critiques<\/a> of the Iraq war, which he first voiced years before he ran for office, was that the US did not \u201ctake the oil\u201d from the region to \u201creimburse ourselves\u201d for the war.<\/p>\n The president views energy geopolitics \u201calmost like the world is a Settlers of Catan board\u2014you kidnap the president of Venezuela and, ipso facto, you now control all the oil,\u201d says Rory Johnston, a Canadian oil market researcher. \u201cI do think he legitimately, to a degree, believes that. It\u2019s not true, but I think that\u2019s an important frame for how he’s justifying and driving the momentum of his policy.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n