Mother Jones illustration; Alex Brandon/AP, Leslie Mazoch/AP

This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

President Donald Trump has made it clear: His vision for Venezuela’s future involves the US profiting from its oil.

“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies—the biggest anywhere in the world—go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure,” the president told reporters at a news conference Saturday, following the shocking capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife.

But experts caution that a number of realities—including international oil prices and longer-term questions of stability in the country—are likely to make this oil revolution much harder to execute than Trump seems to think.

Trump seems to view the situation almost like “a Settlers of Catan board—you kidnap the president of Venezuela and, ipso facto, you now control all the oil.”

“The disconnect between the Trump administration and what’s really going on in the oil world, and what American companies want, is huge,” says Lorne Stockman, an analyst with Oil Change International, a clean energy and fossil fuels research and advocacy organization.

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 Chávez nationalized much of the industry. The country was producing just 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 each day in 2023.) Sanctions placed on Venezuela during the first Trump administration, meanwhile, have driven production even further down.

Trump has repeatedly implied that freeing up all that oil and increasing production would be a boon for the oil and gas industry—and that he expects American oil companies to take the lead. This kind of thinking—a natural offshoot of his “drill, baby, drill” philosophy—is typical for the president. One of Trump’s 

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