NEW YORK — Oil giant Chevron confirmed that it will expand operations in Venezuela after President Donald Trump announced an ambitious deal to develop the nation’s oil reserves and give the Pentagon a stake in the profits.
Chevron, the only US oil company with a major presence in Venezuela, said Wednesday that it has been assigned additional acreage in the Orinoco Belt, where it has active operations.
The company plans to invest more than $7 billion over the next five years, with the goal of more than doubling its current production to about 600,000 barrels a day.
“Chevron’s history in Venezuela spans more than a century, and our expanded position reflects our confidence in the country’s deep resource potential,” CEO Mike Wirth said in a prepared statement.
Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven reserves, totaling more than 303 billion barrels of crude oil, according to OPEC’s 2025 Annual Statistical Bulletin.
Saudi Arabia is a distant second with 267 billion barrels.
Yet because Venezuela’s energy infrastructure is severely degraded and the nation is operating under international sanctions, its daily production is just over one million barrels, compared with the 10 million to 11 million barrels that Saudi Arabia produces each day.
The US produces almost 14 million barrels per day.
Chevron, the second-largest US oil company, has had a presence in Venezuela since 1923.
The White House confirmed Monday that it is partnering with North American Blue Energy Partners as part of Trump’s push to tap into Venezuela’s oil industry.
“What we’re doing is increasing the confidence for private businesses to come do deals in Venezuela, directly with the government of Venezuela,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said during an interview Wednesday on CNBC.
Yet the agreement has been met with skepticism from energy experts who say it will take years to revive Venezuela’s oil industry, which is in disarray after years of neglect.
There are also questions about whether Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, has the authority to give Chevron 100-year rights over 17 oil fields with reserves of 65 billion barrels — and whether future Venezuelan or American administrations would overturn the agreement.
Venezuela’s constitution states that arrangements like the one that the United States announced this week must be approved by the National Assembly, which has not happened, wrote Ian Vásquez, vice president for international studies at the Cato Institute.
“The deal lacks legitimacy since it was agreed to with a dictatorship that has clung to power for decades through violence and by committing what was probably the largest electoral fraud in Latin American history in 2024,” Vásquez wrote.
“The agreement was also reached under overwhelming pressure, military and otherwise, from the United States. As such, any future Venezuelan democracy will question the deal, thus undermining confidence in the current arrangement.”
Trump has eyed Venezuela’s oil since the capture of Nicolás Maduro and has pressed to get US businesses back into the country.
“We have Exxon going in, we have Chevron going in. We have our big oil companies going in,” he said in January.
He suggested again on Monday that other US oil majors were preparing for a return, though other than Chevron, there is no evidence of that.
Exxon Mobil CEO Darren Woods said in January that Venezuela was “ uninvestable.” An Exxon spokesman said this week that “nothing has changed.”
The history of US oil majors in Venezuela explains the hesitation.
Venezuela nationalized its oil industry in 1976 and created the state-owned company Petróleos de Venezuela S.A.
A second nationalization occurred in 2007, when President Hugo Chávez pushed foreign oil companies into state-controlled joint ventures and seized the assets of companies that refused.
Chevron agreed to a joint venture. Others, including Exxon and ConocoPhillips, refused, and Venezuela took their assets.
Trump has said that the agreement with Venezuela would “substantially lower” gasoline prices in the US.
However, analysts have repeatedly warned that Venezuela’s dilapidated oil infrastructure will require years of restoration work and tens of billions of dollars to resuscitate.
“It could take 2 to 4 years to get new greenfield facilities online in the Orinoco region,” Amy Jaffe, director of the Global Energy, Climate, and Sustainability Lab at New York University, said in an email.
“Other places where there is no pipeline and other kinds of support infrastructure could take longer.”
Meanwhile, the national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline jumped overnight to $4.12, according to the motor club AAA. That is 93 cents more than it cost at this point last year.