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US president says oil will be sold at market prices and that he will control resulting the revenues.
Published On 7 Jan 2026
United States President Donald Trump has announced that Venezuela will turn over between 30 and 50 million barrels of sanctioned oil.
Trump said the oil would be sold at market prices and that he would control the resulting revenues to ensure the money is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the US.
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He added that he had directed his energy secretary, Chris Wright, to execute the plan “immediately”.
“It will be taken by storage ships, and brought directly to unloading docks in the United States,” Trump said on his platform, Truth Social, on Tuesday.
Trump’s announcement follows his pledge to “take back” Venezuela’s oil reserves and revive the Latin American country’s flailing energy industry in the wake of his administration’s abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
Trump has said that US oil companies stand ready to invest billions of dollars to rebuild Venezuela’s decrepit infrastructure.
Analysts say restoring Venezuela’s production to anything close to its peak would require massive investment and could take years.
Venezuela’s oil sector would need capital investment of about $110bn to return to its mid-2010s output of about 2 million barrels per day, according to an estimate by Rystad Energy, a Norway-based consultancy.
Some market watchers are sceptical that US companies will commit large investments to the country, given there is an excess of oil in the global market, and considering the previous Hugo Chavez government’s expropriation of the companies’ assets.
ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips were awarded $1.6bn and $8.7bn, respectively, in international arbitration following the Chavez government’s 2007 nationalisation of the oil sector. Caracas did not pay out in either case.
Venezuela once ranked among the world’s top oil producers, but US sanctions and years of underinvestment, mismanagement, and corruption under Maduro and Chavez reduced the sector to a shadow of its former self.
Despite possessing the world’s largest known oil reserves, the Latin American country is estimated to account for less than 1 percent of global output.
More to follow…