The Chevron Venezuela oil expansion forms part of a sweeping push by Washington to revive the country’s ailing energy sector through private investment, with the company announcing plans to more than double production through a $7 billion investment. The announcement follows a series of dramatic moves by the US government to assert control over one of the world’s largest crude reserves.
Venezuela’s oil infrastructure has deteriorated sharply after years of mismanagement. The country is thought to hold around 303 billion barrels of crude oil, and President Donald Trump announced that the US had secured majority control over 65 billion barrels of those reserves, representing about 20% of the total. US Energy Secretary Chris Wright was visiting Venezuela as part of the broader effort to get production moving again.
The deal behind the Chevron Venezuela oil expansion
Washington’s strategy rests on a partnership with CNBC-reported private company North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP), which has been granted concessions to 17 Venezuelan oilfields for a period of 100 years. NABEP, headquartered in Barbados, is led by chief executive Alejandro Betancourt, according to CNBC. In turn, NABEP has granted the US Defense Department a 35% equity stake in the arrangement.
The financial terms of the deal are substantial. According to Reuters, NABEP is expected to pay $200 billion in royalty and tax payments over the first 25 years of the arrangement. That figure gives a sense of the scale Washington is working towards, even as the country’s oilfields remain in poor condition on the ground.
Venezuela’s interim government has signed off on these concessions. Washington is working with interim President Delcy Rodríguez, who previously served as vice president under former President Nicolás Maduro.
How the US came to control Venezuela’s oil
The political backdrop to all of this is extraordinary. The US captured Maduro in a military raid in January and subsequently seized control of Venezuela’s oil exports. The country’s socialist government had presided over a prolonged collapse in output, leaving the infrastructure in a state of disrepair that now requires billions of dollars to reverse.
Rodríguez’s interim government has stepped into the vacuum, partnering with Washington to bring in private capital and technical expertise. Chevron’s planned expansion is one piece of that wider effort, sitting alongside the NABEP concessions as part of a broader restructuring of how Venezuela’s enormous reserves are managed and monetised.
The scale of what is being attempted is hard to overstate. Venezuela’s reserves, at around 303 billion barrels, are among the largest anywhere in the world. Even the 65 billion barrels over which the US has secured majority control represent a prize of enormous long-term value, though returning those fields to productive output will take time and sustained investment.
Chevron shares edged up less than 1% in premarket trading following the announcement, a muted initial reaction that reflects both the scale of the uncertainty involved and the long timeframes typically associated with projects of this kind. Doubling production is not a short-term proposition: it requires infrastructure repair, workforce development and a stable enough political environment to keep capital flowing in.
With Energy Secretary Wright on the ground in Venezuela, and the White House having already published the terms of the NABEP deal, the administration is clearly treating this as an active priority rather than a distant aspiration. The 100-year concession period granted to NABEP underlines just how long a game Washington is playing here.
