“We are going to go into our very large United States oil companies – the largest anywhere in the world – spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure,” the president told reporters at a press conference on Saturday after the shocking capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife.
But experts caution that a number of realities – including international oil prices and long-term questions of stability at home – could make this oil revolution more difficult to execute than Trump thinks.
“The gap between what’s actually going on in the Trump administration and the oil world, and what American companies want,” says Lorne Stockman, an analyst at Oil Change International, a clean energy and fossil fuel research and advocacy organization.
Venezuela is home to one of the world’s largest oil reserves. But oil production there has declined since President Hugo Chávez nationalized much of the industry in the mid-1990s. The country was producing just 1.3 million barrels of oil per day in 2018, down from a high of more than 3 million barrels per day in the late 1990s. (The US, the world’s top producer of crude, is expected to produce an average of 21.7 million barrels per day in 2023.) Meanwhile, sanctions imposed on Venezuela during the first Trump administration have reduced production even further.
Trump has repeatedly said that freeing up all the oil and increasing production would be a boon for the oil and gas industry — and he expects American oil companies to take the lead. This way of thinking – a natural offshoot of his “drill, baby, drill” philosophy – is typical of the president. One of Trump’s main criticisms of the Iraq War, which he first voiced several years before running for president, was that the US did not “take oil” from the region to “reimburse itself” for the war.
The president views energy geopolitics “almost the same way the world is boarded by the Inhabitants of Catan — you kidnap the president of Venezuela and, in effect, you now control all the oil,” says Canadian oil market researcher Rory Johnston. “I think he legitimately, to a degree, believes that. It’s not true, but I think it’s an important framework for how he’s justifying and building momentum for his policy.”
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