President Donald Trump announced Friday that the United States has secured majority control over more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuela’s proven oil reserves, calling it the “biggest oil deal in world history” in a post on Truth Social. Trump said the arrangement was reached at no cost to American taxpayers, through a partnership with private business, working alongside Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodriguez.
The deal comes seven months after US military forces captured Venezuela’s longtime leader, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife in January, prompting Rodriguez, then vice president, to assume the presidency. Rodriguez’s government has since cooperated closely with the Trump administration, easing the Treasury Department’s remaining sanctions on Venezuela’s oil sector and signing legislation that opened the door for private companies to manage extraction directly — steps that laid the legal groundwork in Caracas for Friday’s announcement.
Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven crude reserves but currently produces only about 1.25 million barrels a day, a fraction of its potential after two decades of underinvestment, mismanagement and sanctions.
Trump said the new arrangement would more than double the US oil reserve base and substantially lower gas prices over time, though he did not disclose which companies would hold the stake, how it would be structured, or how the US intends to exercise majority control over reserves that sit inside another country. An unidentified US official described the venture as the world’s second-largest corporate holder of proven oil reserves, after Saudi Arabia’s Aramco.
Rodriguez welcomed the agreement, which Al Jazeera reported is expected to bring roughly $209bn to Venezuela’s treasury. Rubio, writing separately on social media, said the deal would secure stable, low-cost oil for the US while bringing nearly $100bn in private investment to Venezuela, supporting thousands of jobs and helping rebuild the country’s economy. Neither figure has been independently verified.
Venezuelan officials are expected to sign agreements next week granting exploration and production rights to a number of companies, particularly US firms, according to Reuters sources. Those sources said a lease model was under consideration, with fields potentially auctioned to US producers in the Orinoco Belt and Lake Maracaibo regions. Only a handful of foreign oil companies have maintained a continuous presence in Venezuela since Hugo Chávez nationalized the industry’s foreign-held assets roughly two decades ago, prompting ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips to exit; Chevron, Spain’s Repsol and Italy’s Eni stayed, and Chevron is reportedly preparing to expand its operations under Venezuela’s newly revised hydrocarbons framework.
The arrangement could still face legal and constitutional hurdles in Venezuela, where the state has historically retained control over core oil industry activities, according to Reuters. It is not yet clear whether the lease structure Trump described is compatible with those constitutional provisions.
The deal has also drawn scrutiny in Washington that has nothing to do with its economic terms. Democratic Sen. Ed Markey wrote to Chevron’s chief executive this year describing the military operation that removed Maduro as an “illegal and unconstitutional capture,” and separately, Sen. Peter Welch has argued that Trump lacks constitutional authority to direct revenue from Venezuelan oil toward paying US companies without congressional appropriation.
Those objections have not been resolved and the administration has not directly addressed them in connection with Friday’s announcement.
Analysts have also cautioned that the deal may matter more as a long-term energy-security move than an immediate fix for US gas prices, given Venezuela’s degraded oil infrastructure and the time such projects typically take to ramp up production. The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve has fallen to roughly 289.7 million barrels in recent months, leaving Washington with less cushion during future supply disruptions — a gap the administration has cited as part of its rationale for expanding access to foreign reserves.
Friday’s announcement is not the first oil arrangement Trump has struck with Rodriguez’s government. In January, shortly after Maduro’s removal, Trump said Venezuela would hand over between 30 million and 50 million barrels of oil to the US, a transaction worth an estimated $1.8bn to $3bn at the time.
Chevron remains the only major US oil company that never fully withdrew from Venezuela, a position that now leaves it best placed to expand first under the new agreement.
