Rystad Energy models Venezuelan crude output reaching 1.6 million bpd by 2028 and 1.8 million bpd by 2030 if capital, rigs and services scale up.As well as the millions he says he’s already taken.
Chevron, Eni, Repsol, Shell and new entrants like GeoPark, Hunt Oil and NABEP are expanding under revised contracts, with NABEP's Lake Maracaibo output already jumping from roughly 90,000 bpd to nearly 200,000 bpd.
Venezuela had just two active drilling rigs as of August, far short of the roughly 50 rigs needed by 2028 and the Hydrocarbons Ministry's 93-rig target.
The Permian Basin currently produces over 6 million bpd. So Venezuela won’t be up to that level anytime soon. Or ever.
The success of the Trump administration’s blockbuster Venezuela oil deal is riding on fields that are aging, degraded or expensive to access.BTW, Venezuela produces about 1.2 million bpd. So 1.8 in two years is not a massive increase.
The agreement last month with Alejandro Betancourt, an energy mogul with a controversial history, includes 17 fields and gives the US majority control of a huge amount of Venezuela’s oil wealth. Betancourt’s North American Blue Energy Partners has said it aims to more than double crude production, adding about 300,000 barrels a day in just over two years. But conversations with more than a dozen industry executives and analysts suggest that the company will struggle to reach that goal. The names of the 17 fields were identified by Bloomberg News but haven’t been officially listed.
A few legacy sites in the Lake Maracaibo region in northwestern Venezuela, the cradle of the country’s oil industry, have the best chance of rapid output gains. The rest are in the Orinoco Belt in central-eastern Venezuela, an area that’s difficult to drill because it’s remote and produces heavy, tar-like crude that must be extracted using specialized equipment.
Betancourt’s company is under pressure to deliver a quick boost to help calm oil markets upended by the Iran war, and generate enough revenue to win support on the ground. The deal with the US faces blowback from both sides of the political aisle in Venezuela, with some describing it as an abdication of sovereignty. But the Trump administration is betting that the pact will spur other producers to plow money into oil reserves that are now firmly within the US sphere of influence.
“Venezuelan oil production could help diversify away from other geopolitical hotspots, but growth will likely be too gradual to be the only solution given the extent of the Middle East supply disruptions,” Luisa Palacios, a senior research scholar at Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy, said in an interview.
White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said the Trump-Venezuela oil pact “will greatly benefit both the United States and Venezuela for years to come. This historic deal marks a major step toward stabilizing Venezuela’s economy after years of hyperinflation and almost no new investment, while more than doubling the United States’ oil reserves.”
Among the 17 fields, a handful near Lake Maracaibo — the region that helped turn Venezuela into one of the world’s biggest oil producers and exporters by the middle of the 20th century — could add roughly 200,000 barrels a day in about two years without requiring massive investments, according to industry estimates. That’s still shy of NABEP’s target, and even some of the most promising assets will require rehabilitation after decades of neglect.
If Trump tells you it’s raining, go outside and see if you get wet.
