Weeks before U.S. special operations forces entered Venezuela and captured its dictator, Nicolás Maduro, early on Jan. 3, President Donald Trump spoke to reporters on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews and leveled a complaint: The regime in Caracas stole American oil from right under our noses.
“We want it back,” Trump said at the time. “They took our oil rights—we had a lot of oil there. As you know, they threw our companies out, and we want it (the oil) back.”
Eight months after he made those remarks, Trump may feel vindicated. On Aug. 28, the president announced what he described in a social media post as “THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY!,” in which the U.S. government will hold a stake in a private Venezuelan company granted rights to develop 17 oil fields with approximately 65 billion barrels of crude.
That’s more than a fifth of Venezuela’s crude oil reserves. The United States will reportedly have the ability to purchase 20% of the fields’ production at lower rates, making it less costly to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is at its lowest level in decades—thanks to the war with Iran.
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