Key Points
—PDVSA signed memoranda worth $2 billion with US firms Hunt Overseas Oil Company and Crossover Energy Holding for fields in Anzoátegui, Monagas and Barinas, in the presence of White House National Energy Dominance Council director Jarrod Agen.
—Italy’s ENI signed a separate term sheet to return to the Junín-5 block in the Orinoco Belt, with 35 billion barrels of certified reserves and a near-term 75,000 barrels-a-day target. Britain’s BP signed a memorandum to develop gas in the Delta Amacuro platform.
—Four months after the US capture of Nicolás Maduro on January 3, around 700 political prisoners have been released and roughly half the original Maduro cabinet has been replaced.
Two billion dollars, a Trump envoy on the first Miami-Caracas flight in seven years, and an interim president asking the delegation to deliver a personal message to Washington. The Orinoco is open for business, on terms set in Washington.
A new wave of Venezuela US oil deals signed last week pushes the post-Maduro reopening of the country’s hydrocarbon sector into its most concrete phase to date. The Rio Times, the Latin American financial news outlet, reports that interim president Delcy Rodríguez hosted Jarrod Agen, executive director of the White House National Energy Dominance Council, at the Miraflores presidential palace on April 30 to witness PDVSA sign two memoranda worth $2 billion with Hunt Overseas Oil Company and Crossover Energy Holding for operations in Anzoátegui, Monagas and Barinas states.
Agen arrived in Caracas on the inaugural Miami-Caracas American Airlines flight, the first US-Venezuela commercial connection in seven years. He framed the Trump administration’s posture in operational terms, telling reporters investments in oil, gas and mining are moving “at Trump speed”. The signing came two days after a separate term sheet between PDVSA and ENI for the Junín-5 block in the Orinoco Belt and a memorandum with British BP for offshore gas development in Delta Amacuro.
What the Venezuela US Oil Deals Cover
The Hunt Overseas and Crossover contracts cover crude production in Monagas (eastern oil heartland), Anzoátegui (Anaco area) and Barinas (western Llanos basin), with associated gas earmarked to support Venezuela’s collapsed electricity grid. Both companies will operate inside the Orinoco Belt structure, the world’s largest heavy and extra-heavy crude reserve. Rodríguez highlighted the gas-to-power dimension, saying the deals are “not only for petroleum but also for associated gas that can drive the Venezuelan electricity system”.
The ENI agreement, signed on April 28 with chief executive Claudio Descalzi present, is the most ambitious of the new wave. Junín-5 holds 35 billion barrels of certified reserves, more than 10 percent of Venezuela’s 303-billion-barrel total, and ENI is targeting 75,000 barrels per day in the near term. The Italian major remained partially active in Venezuela through the sanctions years and is partnered with Repsol in a major Falcón offshore gas field; Descalzi called the new deal “one of the most important investments of our company in this country and in the region”.
BP’s return is structurally smaller but symbolically large. The British supermajor signed a memorandum to develop natural gas in the Delta Amacuro continental shelf, the offshore platform facing Trinidad and Tobago that has been Venezuela’s most contested cross-border gas frontier for two decades. Italian ENI also retains a methanol plant interest separately, and Chevron, Shell, Repsol and Maurel & Prom are already operating under previously announced licences.
The Delcy Quote and the Sheinbaum Comparison
Rodríguez closed the Miraflores ceremony with a directly aimed message to Trump: “Tell President Trump, who is a man of action, that here there are men and women of action — but also of their word. We have pledged our word to build solid foundations in long-term relations between the United States and Venezuela.” The framing reverses two decades of Bolivarian rhetoric and lands at a moment when Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum is publicly resisting US interference over the CIA Chihuahua operation.
The contrast is the story of LATAM’s bilateral posture toward Washington in mid-2026: Caracas inviting capital and accepting Treasury oversight, Mexico City pushing back on US operations on its soil. Both governments face the same Trump administration; their answers are different, and so is the price tag on the resulting commercial flow.
Four Months Into the Transition: What Has Moved
The political ledger after four months is concrete enough to track. Foro Penal counts 768 political-prisoner releases between January 8 and April 24 — of which the Amnesty Law (passed in late January and ended on April 24 by Rodríguez) accounted for 186 — with around 473 detainees remaining at the cut-off date, of whom 286 are civilians and 187 are military personnel excluded by the law’s design. The release total is the largest in Venezuelan democratic-transition history.
Cabinet turnover is similarly substantial. Rodríguez has replaced more than 40 percent of the original Maduro cabinet, including the entire economic team and Vladimir Padrino — defence minister for over a decade and a defining loyalist — moved to the agriculture portfolio. Larry Devoe was appointed the new prosecutor general by the National Assembly and Eglée González Lobato as ombudsperson, completing a turnover of the institutional accountability architecture.
The Production and Audit Backbone
The commercial story rests on two infrastructure pieces. The first is the new Hydrocarbons Law, passed in late January, which allows direct PDVSA-foreign company contracts without requiring joint-venture structures and which underpins the Hunt Overseas, Crossover and ENI deals. The second is the Treasury-contracted private audit firm confirmed on April 27 by Central Bank president Luis Pérez González, which monitors every barrel exported and every dollar received under the new licensing regime.
Production has begun moving on this scaffold. PDVSA reported 1.1 million barrels per day in February, up 10 percent year on year per OPEC, and Reuters data put April crude exports at the highest level since 2018. Rodríguez told the assembled US oil executives that production would reach 1.4 million barrels per day by year-end, a number well above the 943,000 bpd OPEC secondary sources reported for end-2025 and that would represent the fastest production recovery in PDVSA’s modern history.
What Is Not Resolved
The unresolved file is political. Rodríguez has now passed 120 days in office without setting a date for free elections, the opposition led by María Corina Machado is organising openly for the first time in years but has no constitutional pathway to power, and the Amnesty Law’s design left almost 200 military political prisoners outside its scope. The Treasury audit framework supplies financial discipline but not democratic legitimacy.
For investors, the trade is now one of the cleanest in LATAM: explicit US backing, sequential commercial wins, audited revenue flows, and a sovereign-debt restructuring still ahead that some buy-side analysts price in the 35-to-40 cents range on the dollar. The macro tailwind is real, but it sits on top of a transition whose political destination is, by design, still unclear.
Four months in, the Venezuela US oil deals have answered one question — whether American capital would return — and deferred the harder one of what comes after the audit cycle ends.