President Donald Trump has made it clear: his vision for Venezuela’s future is for the United States to profit from its oil.
“We’re going to engage our very large American oil companies – the largest in the world – spend billions of dollars, fix seriously broken infrastructure, oil infrastructure,” the president told reporters at a news conference Saturday after the shocking capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife.
But experts warn that a number of realities – including international oil prices and long-term stability issues at home – will likely make the oil revolution much more arduous to achieve than Trump thinks.
“The disconnect between the Trump administration and what’s really happening in the oil world and what U.S. companies want is huge,” says Lorne Stockman, an analyst at Oil Change International, an organization that researches and advocates for spotless energy and fossil fuels.
Venezuela has some of the largest oil deposits in the world. But oil production there has declined sharply since the mid-1990s, when President Hugo Chávez nationalized most of the industry. The country was produce just in 2018, 1.3 million barrels of oil were produced per day, up from a peak of over 3 million barrels per day in the delayed 1990s. (The United States, the world’s largest oil producer, produced an average 21.7 million barrels Meanwhile, sanctions imposed on Venezuela during the first Trump administration further reduced production.
Trump has repeatedly suggested that releasing all the oil and increasing production would be a boon for the oil and gas industry and that he expects U.S. oil companies to take the lead. This kind of thinking – a natural consequence of his “drill, baby, practice” philosophy – is typical of the president. One of the Trumps palm reviews of the Iraq War, which he first expressed years before running for office, was that the United States did not “take oil” from the region to “recoup” the costs of the war.
The president sees energy geopolitics “almost as if the world were run by the Settlers of Catan – you kidnap the president of Venezuela and therefore control all the oil,” says Rory Johnston, a Canadian oil researcher. “I think he’s right to believe that to some extent. It’s not true, but I think it’s an important framework for how he justifies and drives the dynamics of his policies.”
Some of the Trump administration’s policies that were intended to revive U.S. oil and gas have actually hurt the industry. U.S. oil producers have repeatedly expressed concerns about the method tariffs and unstable market contributed to a dramatic decline in global oil prices, which fell by 20% in 2025 biggest losses since 2020. Oil and gas companies, like most enormous industries with significant capital invested in infrastructure, value long-term political and financial stability. More enormous, unpredictable shocks – to supply, the regulatory environment, tariffs and more – could not come at a worse time for U.S. oil.
“Right now, the oil market is a little bit oversupplied,” Stockman says. “It hurts American companies. The last thing they want is to suddenly open up huge oil reserves.”
A number of decisions, both brief and long term, could impact the impact of a U.S. invasion of Venezuela on U.S. crude oil. First, there is the question of what will happen to all the oil that Venezuela currently has. Over the past few months, the administration has significantly tightened sanctions and blockades on Venezuela, creating a massive glut of oil that has been unable to get out of the country.