The 55 Percent Deal: How Washington Claimed Venezuela’s Oil Without a Signature

Energy · Venezuela

An American president announced the biggest oil deal in history on a Friday. By Saturday, the only thing everyone agreed on was that nobody had seen it, and the senators who authorise such things were asking to.

What Was Announced On Friday

The announcement came in the president’s own words and on his own channel. The United States, he said, has entered an agreement giving it effective control of 55% of production from 17 Venezuelan fields with a proven potential of 65 billion barrels.

Rodríguez’s government supplied the corroborating arithmetic. The deal, her statement said, could draw $100 billion of investment into Venezuelan oil and yield more than $209 billion in taxes for Caracas.

The mechanism is a new private company, operated by an American partner nobody has named, holding 100-year development rights granted by Rodríguez. A US official told the Associated Press the company would rank behind only Saudi Aramco as a holder of proven reserves.

Venezuela’s proven reserves are the biggest of any country: about 303 billion barrels, roughly 17% of the world’s total. Most sit in the Orinoco belt, where the crude is extra-heavy and expensive to turn into fuel.

Friday’s claim is not about drilling next quarter. It is about who holds the paper on the barrel for the next century.

The Deal That Nine Months Built

The agreement rests on a January intervention. On 3 January, US special forces captured Nicolás Maduro and flew him to the United States to face narcoterrorism charges; he remains jailed and has pleaded not guilty.

Delcy Rodríguez, his vice president, took over with Washington’s blessing and a clear condition: comply with the American agenda. One of her first acts was a hydrocarbons law ending the requirement that foreigners operate through PDVSA joint ventures — reversing a bedrock of the Chávez era.

That law had already produced 29 participation contracts and a forecast of $1.4 billion in oil investment this year, up 55% on 2025. Friday’s announcement is the same opening, scaled to the size of the prize.

Trump frames the history as restitution. Venezuela, he argues, stole American oil when Hugo Chávez nationalised foreign assets — and the arbitration claims from that era, held by some of the world’s largest oil companies, are still being litigated.

The Questions Nobody Has Answered

The first question is legal. Senators from both parties spent the weekend asking which statute authorises an American state claim over a foreign country’s reserves.

The second question is practical. Producing Orinoco crude at scale needs diluent, upgraders, power and ports, and years of decay have degraded all four; output collapsed from over 3 million barrels a day in the early 2000s to 350,000 in 2020, and has only recovered to about 1.2 million.

The industry’s own verdict is on record. Days after Maduro’s capture, Trump gathered oil executives at the White House, and ExxonMobil’s Darren Woods called the country “un-investable”.

The third question is financial. No text has been published, so there is no way to know who pays for the rebuild, who carries the risk, or what happens to Venezuela’s existing creditors.

Until a document exists, every figure in the announcement is an assertion. The market’s caution this weekend reflects exactly that.

The history of such paper urges the same caution. Venezuela’s oil has been promised, pledged, nationalised and mortgaged so many times that the world’s lawyers know the Orinoco’s geology by heart; what none of them has ever seen is a claim like this one enforced.

Why Gasoline Prices Decide The Politics

The political clock on this deal is the American pump. Gasoline averages $4.09 a gallon, against $3.21 a year ago.

The strategic petroleum reserve sits below 300 million barrels, down more than 100 million since the start of 2026, its cushion thinned by six months of a Gulf war that has slowed the Strait of Hormuz — once the passage of a fifth of the world’s petroleum — to a crawl.

The deal’s oil is earmarked accordingly: a US official says purchases from the new company would fill the reserve and supply the military first.

Venezuelan heavy crude is precisely what many Gulf Coast refineries were built to run. That is the real logic of the claim, and it is why the idea has surfaced in every American debate about supply for two decades.

The Other Claimants

Washington is not the only capital with paper on Venezuela. For two decades the country’s crude has flowed mostly to Asia, repaying loans that kept Caracas afloat through the sanctions years.

Those arrangements were built on the same extra-heavy barrels the new American company would now administer. Any 100-year concession has to say what happens to the shipments already pledged elsewhere.

A new structure that ignores the old claimants invites two decades of litigation. One that pays them requires a fund nobody has yet described.

For Latin America the precedent cuts both ways. A hemisphere watching Washington claim reserves by announcement will price its own contracts accordingly, and every resource government from Brasilia to Buenos Aires took note this weekend.

Frequently Asked Questions

What did the United States actually get in the Venezuela oil deal?

According to the announcement, 55% of effective output from 17 fields holding 65 billion proven barrels — an ownership stake plus the right to buy oil at cost, through a new company with 100-year rights. No signed text has been published, so the claim remains unverified.

Who will operate the seventeen Venezuelan fields?

Nobody has been named. The described structure puts a new private company in charge under 100-year rights, but its ownership and operator have not been disclosed.

Is the US claim on Venezuela’s oil legal?

That is the open question. Senators of both parties have asked which statute authorises it, and any arrangement would also face Venezuela’s own constitution, which treats subsoil resources as state property.

Will the deal lower American gasoline prices?

Not quickly. Orinoco crude needs years of investment in upgraders, power and ports before significant new volumes reach refineries, whatever the paper says.

This article was produced by The Rio Times’ automated newsroom system. How we use AI · Report an error · Editorial responsibility: Matthias Camenzind, Editor-in-Chief