Venezuela’s oil industry has flailed under government control – Mexico and Brazil have had more success with nationalizing |
U.S. President Donald Trump has ignited a contentious debate over who has the right to control Venezuela’s vast oil reserves.
Speaking on Jan. 3, 2026, after the U.S. military seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the U.S. president declared, “We built Venezuela’s oil industry, and now we’re going to take it back.”
By Jan. 6, Trump was saying that Venezuela would provide the U.S. with up to 50 million barrels of oil in the near future.
The next day, the U.S. seized two tankers bound from Venezuela for other markets – less than a month after it seized two others it said were transporting Venezuelan oil.
Long-term plans go much further. Trump envisions major U.S. oil companies, such as Chevron and ExxonMobil, to invest some US$100 billion into reviving Venezuela’s struggling industry, with the investing companies reimbursed through future production. So far, neither Venezuelan authorities nor U.S. oil companies have said whether they’re willing to do this.
As a scholar of global energy, I believe that Trump’s words and actions, including his consultations with oil executives before Maduro’s removal, signal a bold push to reassert American dominance in a country with vast oil reserves.
Trump’s “Venezuela took our oil, we’re taking it back” rationale apparently references the South American nation’s initial nationalization of its oil industry in 1976, plus a wave of expropriations in 2007 under Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.
U.S. oil companies played a big role in launching and sustaining Venezuela’s oil boom, starting in the 1910s. Companies such as Standard Oil, a predecessor of ExxonMobil, and Gulf Oil, which eventually became part of Chevron, invested heavily in exploration, drilling and infrastructure, transforming Venezuela into a major global supplier.
Contracts from that era often blurred lines between reserve ownership and production rights. Venezuela legally retained subsoil ownership but granted or sold broad concessions to foreign operators, such as Royal Dutch-Shell. That effectively gave control of reserves and production to the oil companies, but not forever.
This ambiguity likely has played a role in Trump alleging outright theft through nationalization, a claim that holds little grounding in the historical precedent of how Venezuela and other nations have managed ownership of their natural reserves.
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