An oil tanker is docked at a pier at the El Palito refinery of the state oil company PDVSA.
Jesus Vargas | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
President Donald Trump said Tuesday evening that the interim authorities in Venezuela will be turning over between 30 million to 50 million barrels of oil to the United States on the heels of the U.S.’s dramatic ouster of the South American country’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro.
Trump, in a social media post, said the oil will be sold at its market price, “and that money will be controlled by me, as President of the United States of America, to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States!”
“I have asked Energy Secretary Chris Wright to execute this plan, immediately,” Trump wrote. “It will be taken by storage ships, and brought directly to unloading docks in the United States.”
Trump said that the oil being turned over the U.S. was “high quality” and “sanctioned.”
U.S. crude futures fell 1.3% to $56.39 per barrel on the heels of Trump’s announcement.
The announcement came three days after U.S. forces captured Maduro and his wife in Caracas and took them to New York, where they are charged in a federal drug-trafficking conspiracy indictment.
The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that Trump plans to meet with representatives from the major U.S. oil companies Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Exxon Mobil, along with other domestic producers, at the White House on Friday “to discuss making significant investments in Venezuela’s oil sector.”
Trump has said that U.S. oil companies would end up investing billions of dollars to rehabilitate Venezuela’s aging oil production capabilities.
Chevron currently operates in Venezuela, the only U.S. oil company to do so. The assets of ConocoPhillips and Exxon were nationalized by Venezuela’s then-President Hugo Chávez in the mid-2000s.
Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, pleaded not guilty on Monday during their arraignment in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
During that proceeding, Maduro told Judge Alvin Hellerstein that he had been “kidnapped” and that he was a “prisoner of war.”