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In a meeting with oil industry leaders at the White House on Friday, President Trump said the US industry will be “spending at least $100 billion of their own money … to rebuild the capacity and the infrastructure necessary” for Venezuela to begin once more exporting large volumes of crude — and that China and Russia would be welcome to purchase the barrels.
The meeting comes as the administration has leaned on the US oil industry to reenter Venezuela and begin rebuilding infrastructure to export oil after the capture and extraction of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.
The meeting included leaders from companies ExxonMobil (XOM), Chevron (CVX), ConocoPhillips (COP), Valero Energy (VLO), and other key US oil players. Trump said with the US industry’s investments, exports out of Venezuela would reach “levels never ever seen before.”
Before the US blockaded sanctioned oil tankers, the country’s exports had fallen to less than 1 million barrels per day after reaching highs of more than 3 million barrels per day around the turn of the century.
According to figures widely cited throughout the media and the oil industry itself, Venezuela is sitting on around 300 billion barrels’ worth of “proved” oil, meaning barrels that have, in theory, been confirmed as commercially viable by conclusive testing or actual production.
But Venezuela, once the strongest oil-producing nation in the world by volume, has seen its industry crumble under the leadership of Hugo Chavez and Maduro, especially following Chavez’s total nationalization of the industry under PDVSA.
Corruption, mismanagement, brain drain, and a lack of repair and upkeep work on critical infrastructure, including throughout Venezuela’s flagship Orinoco Heavy Oil Belt, have made operating without significant investment nearly impossible, several analysts told Yahoo Finance.
All US companies left the country when the industry was nationalized — with the exception of Chevron, which has remained operational under permission from the US Treasury Department.
During his comments, Trump — who has insisted that the US is fully in control of Venezuela’s oil industry — said the US will be “making the decision on which companies we’re going to allow to go in.”
And in Venezuela, Trump said, oil companies would be “dealing with us directly, you’re not going to be dealing with Venezuela at all,” and that those energy operators would have “total safety, total security” in the country.
