Chevron pledges to double its Venezuelan oil production

By David Goldman, CNN

(CNN) — Chevron said it would invest $7 billion in its Venezuelan oil projects, expecting to double its current oil production by 2031.

It’s a long-expected decision, although the company didn’t arrive at it easily. Despite President Donald Trump’s demands that US oil companies take advantage of his administration’s January ouster of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, US oil companies have been slow to commit to new investments in Venezuela because of its uncertain political environment.

Chevron is the only major US oil company that has maintained a constant presence in Venezuela throughout the past several decades. In April, it increased its ownership stake in its joint venture with Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A, or PDVSA, Venezuela’s state-owned oil company. Chevron now owns 49% of that joint venture.

The company said Venezuela assigned its new oil fields to exploit in the country’s Orinoco Belt, a region that produces thick, sludgy, tar-like oil that many US Gulf-area refining facilities are tailor made to refine. The oil is quite cheap to produce – less than $20 a barrel, according to Chevron, considering the roughly $90 a barrel that US oil is current fetching.

Chevron expects to be able produce about 600,000 barrels a day from its Venezuelan oil projects in five years, up from roughly 300,000 today.

“Our expanded position reflects our confidence in the country’s deep resource potential,” said Mike Wirth, Chevron’s chairman and CEO. “This progress reflects the dedication of our Venezuelan employees and our long-standing focus on the responsible development of the country’s resources.”

But in an interview on Bloomberg Television Wednesday morning, Wirth cautioned that the investment in Venezuela will not be a fix for the disruptions in the global oil markets caused by the fighting between the United States and Iran.

“These things work on different time cycles. Investment in growth in Venezuela will will take years,” he said. “The disruption in the Middle East is taking supply off very abruptly, and so that’s a very different thing.”

Trump has urged US oil companies to take advantage of the country’s new leadership under Maduro’s replacement, interim President Delcy Rodríguez, who has taken some steps to reform the country’s oil industry that she had once led. But, other than Chevron, no American energy companies have been willing to rededicate resources there.

Many foreign energy companies, including American oil majors ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil, had their assets seized by Venezuela in 2007 during then-President Hugo Chávez’s nationalization drive and were booted out of the country. That triggered tens of billons of dollars in compensation claims.

The country has ramped up production over the course of the year to 1.2 million barrels per day, up from around 1 million at the start of the year. But mismanagement, underinvestment and decades of international sanctions on the Venezuelan government contributed to the decline of the country’s oil industry.

A massive long-term investment over many years will be needed to return the country to anything close to the 3.5 million barrels of oil per day it had been producing before the socialist regime took over in the late 1990s, according to Luisa Palacios, the former Citgo chair and current managing director of Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

That’s in part why the Trump administration announced Monday that the United States has entered a deal to take majority ownership in a joint oil venture with a Venezuelan energy company. The unusual agreement could help companies like Chevron and others feel more secure and confident making long-term investments in a country with a shaky history.

The US government has imposed sanctions on Venezuela since 2005, and the first Trump administration in 2019 effectively blocked all crude exports to the United States from PDVSA. Then-President Joe Biden in 2022 granted Chevron a permit to operate in Venezuela — a license Trump revoked in March but later reissued on condition that no proceeds went to the Maduro government.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.

CNN’s Chris Isidore contributed reporting.