Oil sits at the heart of Donald Trump’s Venezuelan gamble. Within a day of the US operation which ousted President Nicolas Maduro, Trump made his top priority clear: reviving the country’s oil industry.
“We’re going to have our very large US oil companies – the biggest anywhere in the world – go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken oil infrastructure and start making money for the country,” he said at a news conference on Saturday.
He has since said Venezuela will imminently hand over 30 to 50 million barrels of crude to the US government – worth around £2.1bn – and the US has seized two sanctioned tankers.
On top of that, he has said expanded American operations in Venezuela could be “up and running” in under 18 months.
Big promises. But how realistic are they?
Current state of affairs
In the short term, it is not clear where the 30 to 50 million barrels of oil would come from. America’s blockade on Venezuelan oil exports has put a chokehold on the country’s oil industry.
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Data from Kpler, a global real-time data and analytics provider, suggests that there are currently about 40 million barrels of Venezuelan oil in storage. Around half of those are sitting on ships that either managed to pass through the blockade or are idling off Venezuela’s shores.
Sky News has mapped roughly 30 US-sanctioned vessels sitting near Venezuela’s coastline.
Some ships are able to pass freely through the blockade – and they are American. The US imports 20% of Venezuela’s oil, produced by the US oil company Chevron, which was exempted from sanctions by Joe Biden in 2022.
Sky News has identified 16 tankers with a history of transporting Venezuelan crude oil to the US for processing. Four of these ships have arrived in Venezuela from the US since 6 January, while two others are still en route.
This includes two vessels that set sail after Maduro’s ouster on 3 January.
Minerva Astra, a tanker sailing under a Greek flag, left Pascagoula in Mississippi eight hours after Maduro’s seizure. Satellite imagery from 5 January captured the ship making its way past Cuba.
In the longer term, even if the blockade is lifted, experts told Sky News the ambition to have the industry up and running in 18 months is unrealistic.
In part because the country’s oil infrastructure is in disrepair, decayed by decades of underinvestment and corruption.
“This is not gonna be cheap, this is not going to be fast, and this is not going to be easy,” says Jorge Leon, vice president of Rystad Energy.
In the best-case scenario, assuming quick stability in the government, Rystad estimates it will take five to seven years for production to double to two million barrels per day – one million lower than the highs of the early 2000s. That would cost at least £80bn.
“I think it may be a bit naive to think that we can go back to these days of two million, three million plus because the infrastructure isn’t there anymore,” says Barney Gray, global crude oil editor at Independent Commodity Intelligence Services.
“To replace everything would be to take us back to those days would be possibly an unimaginable cost that private US majors are simply not prepared to bear.”
Extraction
There are signs of dilapidation in every step of the supply chain. Let’s start with rigs, which are used to drill new wells.
Data from Baker Hughes Rig Count Report shows there were only two operational rigs in Venezuela in 2025. That number has been in single digits since 2019, when there were 24. Ten years ago, there were 67.
Even if the country had greater capacity to extract oil, its ability to process it has been limited too. In part because Venezuelan oil poses challenges before it even comes out of the ground.
Oil from the vast reserves in the Orinoco Belt region is a type of “extra heavy” crude, which requires pre-processing in order to prepare it for refining.
“The main thing to do is to build very expensive, sophisticated upgrading units,” says Clay Seigle, senior fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
There are four upgrading units in the country right now, says Mr Seigle, which are key to making the county’s extra heavy crude more handleable and ready for exporting. But only one is operational.
The only functioning unit was built and is run by the American oil company Chevron, in a joint venture with the state oil company.
“A big piece of the puzzle is going to be renovating and maybe even building new sophisticated upgraders. That kind of initiative is going to cost tens of billions of dollars and require relatively long timescales,” says Mr Seigle.
Storage
Due to the blockade and US sanctions, a lot of oil being produced in Venezuela has been kept in storage.
Analytics company Kpler estimates 22 million barrels of oil were sitting in storage containers around the country in December, the majority of which were in the José industrial complex.
Venezuela has enough storage units on land to fill about 48 million barrels, but not all of that possible space is functional.
Kayrros, a company that uses satellite image analysis to track storage capacity, monitors roughly 98% of all the storage units in Venezuela. It has found that about a third of tanks look unused or unusable.
“On paper, it looks like there’s still some spare capacity,” says Antoine Halff, chief analyst and co-founder at Kayrros. “In practice, that probably is not the case.”
Analysis of satellite images show the storage units that aren’t full are rusty, old and not able to be used.
Like at the Puerto Miranda storage facility. The white caps in satellite imagery from 2022 indicate tanks that are working, with their tops rising and falling with the volume of oil. By 2025, far fewer of them are white. They are black – showing dirt – or orange – indicating rust.
“If you don’t use a tank and you don’t conduct proper maintenance, then it gets rusted pretty quickly. And then if you use a rusted tank, you face issues of leakage, but also contamination of the crude, so that creates all kinds of problems,” says Mr Halff.
Another metric for the decline of the Venezuelan industry is pollution. The thick tar-rich oil found in Venezuela is considered “dirty” because it contains high concentrations of carbon.
Leaking pipes and infrastructure are also to blame for the especially poor environmental record of Venezuelan oil.
Sky News analysis of data from the International Energy Agency (IEA) methane tracker database finds that, with approximately 10kg of methane emissions per barrel of oil produced, Venezuela far exceeds comparable countries for its intensity of methane emissions.
This was more than double the 4kg of methane emissions per barrel produced in Algeria, the next biggest polluter in the top 20 major oil-producing nations.
The prospects
Tackling the challenges posed by Venezuela’s dilapidated infrastructure would require significant capital, and US oil companies will need serious guarantees about the legitimacy and security of contracts before making that kind of investment.
With the US blockade still in place, and the political future of the country still uncertain, how willing would international investors be to invest in Venezuela?
“The answer at the moment is not very,” says Barney Gray from the ICIS. “Venezuela’s government is in flux, corruption is endemic in the country, so automatically we’re not ticking some early boxes.
“They’ve got a long way to go before the economics can be even remotely demonstrated.”
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
