An oil tanker docked at El Palito port in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, in December. U.S. President Donald Trump's plan to make money off Venezuelan oil faces moral, political and logistical problems, Chris Arsenault writes.Matias Delacroix/The Associated Press
Chris Arsenault is chair of the journalism program at Western University and a former reporter covering Venezuela.
When it comes to the country with the world’s largest oil reserves, U.S. President Donald Trump didn’t mince words on why U.S. commandos seized Venezuela’s president. “They stole our oil,” Mr. Trump said.
Put aside for a moment clear violations of international law from U.S. actions and the fact “our” oil somehow ended up under Venezuela’s soil.
A picture Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social of deposed Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro handcuffed and blindfolded in a tracksuit aboard a U.S. navy ship conjures images of other oil-rich autocrats deposed by Washington and its proxies: Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. Neither of those interventions ended well.
A photo of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro handcuffed and blindfolded on a U.S. navy ship has echoes of past interventions by Washington into oil-rich countries.@realDonaldTrump/Reuters
Mr. Trump’s plan to “have our very large United States oil companies” go and “spend billions of dollars” to “fix the badly broken infrastructure” and start making money, faces a host of problems: moral, political and logistical.
In short, don’t expect a big influx of Venezuela’s estimated 303 billion barrels of oil to end up on tankers heading north any time soon.
Mr. Maduro is a bumbling, brutal, inept autocrat. He blatantly stole the last election and his disastrous mismanagement forced nearly eight million Venezuelans to flee. Most Venezuelans are happy to see him gone. But like past U.S. interventions in major oil producers, power vacuums can create chaos.
War games simulations run previously by Washington on what could happen following Mr. Maduro’s ouster indicate the chances for low-intensity civil conflict are substantial. Already, armed members of pro-Maduro civilian militias are out in force in the capital Caracas.
Leftist rebels from Colombia operate in jungle areas around Venezuela’s borders. Attempts by Exxon or other U.S. oil majors – who had their assets nationalized by Maduro predecessor Hugo Chavez – to bring in technicians and repair infrastructure to expand production are likely to be met by resistance, just as U.S. forces and oil companies faced in Iraq.
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Ahead of that invasion in 2003, the administration of former president George W. Bush changed the name of its planned Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL) to Operation Iraqi Freedom, seemingly aware of the optics. Mr. Trump has no such scruples. He’s almost refreshingly honest about U.S. foreign policy goals.
The plan, as it was for Iraq, is for Venezuela’s oil wealth to finance the military and political costs of controlling the country, or as the U.S. Department of War put it to, “[reimburse the] people in our country who were forced out of Venezuela.”
America can deploy gunboat diplomacy around the globe, but Mr. Trump shouldn’t hold his breath waiting for a cheque.
Venezuela’s oil production dropped from over three million barrels per day in the early 2000s to less than one million in 2025, according to the consultancy Wood Mackenzie, owing to chronic mismanagement and U.S. sanctions.
Big increases in production, the kind of return on investment required for toppling a government and rebuilding an industry, will not be cheap or easy.
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In a favorable scenario, a reasonable security environment and lots of capital, Wood Mackenzie estimates boosting production by one million barrels per day could happen within a couple of years.
Beyond refitting old wells or other repairs, expanding productive capacity is a longer-term and more expensive project. Venezuela’s largest reserves sit in the Orinoco Belt, a region with heavy crude not so different from Canada’s oil sands.
Boosting production to three-to-four million barrels per day means creating new infrastructure to access Orinoco crude which could take a decade and cost more than US$100-billion. The Trump administration, presumably, will be long gone by then.
As explosions rang out in Caracas, one subset of Canada’s political class fretted about domestic oil exports to the U.S. being replaced by production from Venezuela.
“The consequences to Alberta and Canada’s economy will be severe,” wrote Kevin M. Vickers, one-time New Brunswick Liberal Party leader and Canada’s former ambassador to Ireland, who lamented the potential impact on shareholders and pension funds. In the midst of a blatant resource grab, his concerns are misplaced. Moreover, his worries aren’t grounded in medium-term oil market realities.
Given Venezuela’s current state, it is hard to imagine anyone wanting to invest tens of billions of dollars in long-term infrastructure today.
The real problem for the hemisphere, and Canada specifically, given recent U.S. annexation threats, is an unabashed return to powerful states taking natural wealth by force.
“Today it is Venezuela,” wrote Chilean President Gabriel Boric, “tomorrow it could be any other country.”