Ownership Without Control: Behind the US and Venezuela’s Historic Oil Deal
Behind the “biggest oil deal in history” lies a 1.9-million-barrel gap between ambition and real production.
On 28 August 2026, the White House announced what it called the biggest oil deal in history. The agreement granted the US access to 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan crude, roughly a fifth of the country’s total reserves and among the largest proven oil deposits on the planet. When the terms were published a few days later, the scale came into focus. A private company, North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP), run by Venezuelan businessman Alejandro Betancourt, secured a 100-year lease on 17 Venezuelan oilfields holding those 65 billion barrels (Rio Times, 2026). One detail stood out more than the numbers: the agreement was signed not by the US Treasury or Department of Energy, but by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a pairing that tells a lot about how Washington views this deal (Rio Times, 2026).
The financial architecture is unusual for what is being presented as a commercial arrangement. In exchange for the lease, the United States takes a 35-percent equity stake in NABEP’s corporate parent. This equity is structured through so-called “penny warrants” issued via the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital, giving Washington ownership without a large upfront cash outlay (Rio Times, 2026). The US is also guaranteed 20 percent of all oil produced and has right of first refusal on the remainder. According to the White House, the resulting crude will help refill the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve (Energy Connects, 2026). Interim President Delcy Rodríguez, who negotiated the deal on Venezuela’s behalf, insists the country retains its sovereignty. Critics on both sides – the Trump administration’s US opposition and within Venezuela itself – dispute that characterisation and consider the arrangement more of a resource grab than a negotiated partnership (Al Jazeera, 2026a).
The deal moved quickly from announcement to implementation. Within days, US Energy Secretary Chris Wright travelled to Caracas, telling reporters that additional agreements were imminent (Bloomberg, 2026a). Chevron, already the largest foreign oil operator in Venezuela, announced it would expand operations in the Orinoco Belt, raising its output to roughly 600,000 barrels a day (NPR, 2026). Italy’s Eni signed a separate multibillion-dollar deal at a ceremony in Caracas overseen jointly by Rodríguez and Wright, distinct from the NABEP lease itself (Al Jazeera, 2026b). One underappreciated effect of this dealmaking is what it displaces: a network of operators tied to deposed president Nicolás Maduro that had, for years, kept sanctioned Venezuelan crude flowing to buyers in Asia (mainly China) despite US sanctions (Bloomberg, 2026b).
Whether any of this translates into the “oil boom” that officials are promising is a separate question. Venezuela currently produces about 1.12 million barrels a day, up from a low of roughly 700,000 during the height of sanctions, but still barely a third of the 3 million barrels a day it pumped at its early-2000s peak (CEIC, 2026). Venezuelan state-owned oil company PDVSA’s own leadership has set a target of 18 percent growth for 2026, which would bring output to roughly 1.3 million barrels a day (Malay Mail, 2026). This increase would represent a meaningful improvement but nowhere close to previous levels. A Bloomberg Opinion analysis published the same week as the Caracas ceremony offered a sobering corrective: restoring Venezuelan production to its historic peak would take more than a decade and an estimated $183 billion in investment (Bloomberg, 2026c). Chevron’s own expansion plans point to a gain of around 320,000 barrels a day by 2031, a real increase but a small fraction of what full recovery would require (Bloomberg, 2026c). The announcement, in other words, establishes a ceiling on what is legally possible far more than it guarantees what will actually be extracted.
Figure 1: Comparison of Venezuela’s daily crude oil production, in millions of barrels.
It is in its execution that the deal becomes a useful case study and more than just a headline. Venezuela retains formal ownership of its oilfields, exactly as Rodríguez says. But the decisions that matter most – how much oil gets produced, where it is sold, and where the resulting revenue is deposited – now sit substantially outside Caracas’s control for the next century. That gap between formal ownership and real decision-making authority is the defining feature of what might be called conditional sovereignty: a state that keeps its flag on the resource while ceding the terms of its exploitation to an external partner. Venezuela’s economy has long depended on oil rents to fund the state; what has changed is that the state no longer fully controls the rent-generating process itself, only a fixed share of its proceeds.
For Venezuela, the practical risk is that a 100-year commitment locks in terms negotiated during a period of acute political weakness, following Maduro’s removal and arrest, that a more stable future government may have little power to renegotiate. A more cautious path would have tied the lease’s most binding provisions to periodic review clauses rather than a single century-long term. For the United States, the risk runs the other way: committing significant capital and equity to a country whose political trajectory remains genuinely uncertain, as the circumstances of Maduro’s own removal demonstrate, is a bet that assumes a stability Venezuela has not yet shown it can sustain. A phased approach, tying deeper US investment to verified political and institutional milestones, would have better matched the deal’s ambitions to Venezuela’s actual conditions on the ground.
Whether this arrangement is remembered as a landmark energy partnership or as a modern instance of resource dependency will depend less on the terms signed this week than on what gets built, and by whom, over the coming decade.
References
Al Jazeera (2026a) US’s Chevron, Italy’s Eni to expand oil projects in Venezuela. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/3/uss-chevron-italys-eni-to-expand-oil-projects-in-venezuela
Al Jazeera (2026b) US energy secretary will travel to Venezuela to unveil oil arrangement. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/1/us-energy-secretary-will-travel-to-venezuela-to-unveil-oil-arrangement
Bloomberg (2026a) Trump’s Energy Chief Says Venezuela Poised to Double Oil Output. Available at: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-02/trump-s-energy-chief-says-venezuela-poised-to-double-oil-output
Bloomberg (2026b) US Oil Deal in Venezuela Displaces OFAC-Sanctioned Producers. Available at: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-01/us-oil-deal-in-venezuela-displaces-ofac-sanctioned-producers
Bloomberg Opinion (2026c) Chevron Shows Why Venezuela’s Oil Boom Remains a Distant Prospect. Available at: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-09-03/chevron-shows-why-venezuela-s-oil-boom-remains-a-distant-prospect
CEIC Data (2026) Venezuela Crude Oil: Production, 2002-2026. Available at: https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/venezuela/crude-oil-production
Energy Connects (2026) As US-Venezuela Oil Deal Takes Shape, Here Are the Key Points. Available at: https://www.energyconnects.com/news/oil/2026/september/as-us-venezuela-oil-deal-takes-shape-here-are-the-key-points/
Malay Mail (2026) Venezuela eyes 18pc oil boost with reforms opening sector to private investors amid US pressure. Available at: https://www.malaymail.com/news/money/2026/01/25/venezuela-eyes-18pc-oil-boost-with-reforms-opening-sector-to-private-investors-amid-us-pressure/206719
NPR (2026) Chevron to expand in Venezuela, days after the U.S. and Venezuela strike oil deal. Available at: https://www.npr.org/2026/09/02/nx-s1-5952190/chevron-venezuela-oil-deal
Rio Times (2026) White House Publishes Venezuela Oil Deal Terms as Trump Says Exxon Is Going In. Available at: https://www.riotimesonline.com/venezuela-oil-deal-terms-exxon-blue-energy-2026/
