Venezuela eyes rapid oil recovery amid US company interest: Javier Blas

Key topics:Quick oil gains possible from Maracaibo and Monagas fields by 2027US and European firms likely to help restore Venezuela’s conventional oilOrinoco belt offers huge potential but needs massive long-term investment.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Javier Blas.Conventional wisdom says the future of the Venezuelan oil industry is bleak. I disagree. The naysayers state that any output gains are far, far away and need huge investments. The reality is more nuanced. There are low-hanging barrels in the country, if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphor. This is good-quality crude that’s relatively easy to extract — and it opens the way to quick wins in reviving dilapidated petroleum infrastructure.Sure, I’m talking about a modest recovery: hundreds of thousands of barrels a day extra rather than the millions needed to lift Venezuela’s production back to the peaks of the early 1970s and late 1990s. Yet this can be brought on stream rapidly by oil industry standards — say 12 to 18 months — and without eyewatering spending. American oil companies will be involved in that effort.Will it be as much as the 700,000 barrels a day extra mooted by US Energy Secretary Chris Wright? That may be a stretch. I’d be more comfortable with predicting a 300,000 to 500,000 range by mid-2027 if all goes smoothly. That’s still a large amount of oil. In an already oversupplied market any extra barrels will hurt prices — and the OPEC cartel..Read more:.Trump backs Rodríguez, cementing ties between Venezuela and oil giants.Where the prevailing commentary is right is that Venezuela has a lot — a lot — of hard-to-get and very low-quality crude. Naysayers are right that developing those reserves would take probably as long as a decade and perhaps as much as $100 billion in investment. The prize is enormous, but so are the challenges..Understanding the difference between the easier- and harder-to-extract oil is crucial when assessing Venezuela’s potential. Regrettably, much of the debate has focused on the difficult stuff. The split is also critical to understanding the role US companies might play. Be sure of one thing: They’re interested in Venezuela, regardless of any public wariness. If they weren’t, why would Chevron Corp., America’s biggest oil company after Exxon Mobil Corp., have fought tooth and nail to remain in the country over the last 25 years? In the coming months, I expect Chevron to push for an even larger role there.Conspiracy theorists see Big Oil’s fingerprints all over President Donald Trump’s Venezuela gambit, just as they did when George W Bush’s troops invaded Iraq. I don’t think the companies knew exactly what Trump was planning. But by late November and early December, anyone who matters in the US industry believed ousting Nicolas Maduro was merely a question of how and when. Many I spoke to thought it was weeks away.To understand what’s going to happen now, one needs to look at the geography and geology. Venezuela sits atop a complex oil map developed over a century of exploration and exploitation. To simplify, let me separate its assets into two buckets: the conventional oilfields around Lake Maracaibo in western Venezuela and the Monagas basin in the east; and the so-called Orinoco belt in its southeast, which I would define as unconventional oil.The “quick wins” to lift production are in Maracaibo and Monagas, says Ivan Sandrea, a Venezuelan geologist and former chief executive officer of Sierra Oil and Gas. “Years of neglect means oil production plunged, but with some limited spending and the right conditions, production can recover.”.The region around Maracaibo is home to the Bolivar Coastal Fields, a cluster that includes legendary sites such as Tia Juana and Bachaquero-Lagunillas. Some have produced oil since the 1920s, but still have more to give. The infrastructure is truly run down, but basic repairs would go a long way to boosting output. It needs a few billion dollars in operational spending, not gargantuan capital expenditure. The US has said it will roll back sanctions to “authorise the import of select oilfield equipment, parts, and services.” The Monagas basin also contains several important oilfields; above all the El Furrial, discovered four decades ago and once a cash cow for the country. As with Maracaibo, the eastern fields are in desperate need of fixing up.Carlos Bellorin, a Venezuelan oil analyst at Welligence Energy Analytics, reckons output from the top-25 Maracaibo and Monagas oilfields has dropped by more than 1 million barrels in a decade. Today, they’re “estimated to produce around 450,000 barrels a day, underscoring the magnitude of the upside,” he says. Other local experts broadly agree, even if everyone has their own estimates.Will US companies play a big role? It depends who you mean. For big oil-services companies — Halliburton Co., Baker Hughes Co., SLB Ltd. and Weatherford International — the answer is yes. Days after Maduro’s capture, the boss of Weatherford, a specialist in constructing wells, described Venezuela as a “massive opportunity” and the “most interesting” development in the industry for a long while.Chevron will be there as it already has an interest in two fields in the Maracaibo basin. Its US oil major peers? Unlikely at first. But Venezuela isn’t just an American playground. Expect to see European companies already present — Italy’s Eni SpA, Spain’s Repsol SA and France’s Maurel et Prom SA — trying to take advantage.After the quick-win barrels are pumped, boosting output further will be tougher. A key constraint is the availability of electricity needed to run pumps and other kit. Power shortages are particularly acute in the Maracaibo basin. To fix this, serious investment would be needed and that would take time..Crucially, the oil from the Maracaibo and Monagas areas is of mixed quality, some of it heavy, but much of it the more easily refined medium and light stuff. US refiners have consumed it for decades and would buy it again given the chance.The Orinoco belt is completely different to the conventional basins. The oil there is so viscous it looks like marmalade, and it needs to be diluted with petrochemicals such as naphtha to flow. Back in the 1990s the region was a magnet for the global oil industry, attracting the likes of Exxon, ConocoPhillips and TotalEnergies SE. Apart from Chevron, most foreign players left or were forced out..Read more:.Trump eyes transition through Maduro ally Delcy Rodríguez amid Venezuelan turmoil.Even if US oil companies are willing to reinvest here, the hurdles are very high. Billions of dollars in investment would be needed, perhaps as much as $10 billion per year. Still, Chevron has a 30% stake in two Orinoco projects and it is likely to double down if conditions allow.The commodity market is usually guilty of two sins when analyzing oil-rich nations emerging from crisis: People underestimate their ability to quickly recover some lost production; and massively overestimate the long-term gains.I’ve seen this movie several times in nearly 30 years covering the industry, including Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011 and Iran in 2021-2023. Venezuela itself is an example: After oil production plunged to a 100-year low of 450,000 barrels a day in 2020, few anticipated the size of its rebound. But it doubled in five years. Now, I expect the post-Maduro nation to surprise positively in the short term, and negatively in the long run..© 2026 Bloomberg L.P.

Venezuela eyes rapid oil recovery amid US company interest: Javier Blas

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