Donald Trump's initial promises about how the Venezuelan oil industry would be handled and how its revitalization would be funded appear unlikely to happen, according to a report from NOTUS, and the president's leading energy official is the first to admit it.
According to a Wednesday report from NOTUS, Chris Wright, Trump's Secretary of Energy, told a Goldman Sachs energy conference that the U.S. government would be taking over control of the Venezuelan oil industry "indefinitely" and managing the sale of it in the marketplace.
“Indefinitely, going forward, we will sell the production that comes out of Venezuela into the marketplace,” Wright explained.
Wright further claimed that the US will eventually allow for the import of "tools and parts" into Venezuela for the purpose of "[stabilizing] the country’s deteriorating oil infrastructure," according to NOTUS. Crude oil extracted in the South American country will also be taken to American refineries in the Gulf Region for processing
Wright's comments run counter to the claims that Trump has made several times since the capture and arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, that American oil companies would be investing money to help rebuild the country's oil infrastructure. While Wright is the first Trump administration official to acknowledge this, oil industry experts have been skeptical of the prospect from the start, noting that the Venezuelan oil industry is too mired in "political instability, debt problems and security vulnerabilities" for risk-averse companies to bother with in the near-term.
Wright claimed at the Miami conference that the administration's goal is to "in the long run, to create the conditions that the major American companies, that were there before, maybe they weren’t before, but want to go, will go in again."
Experts who spoke to NOTUS estimated that it would take 5-10 years before American companies might consider investing in the Venezuelan oil industry, and that is if Trump's plans for the country go off without a hitch. Wright's speech on Wednesday was, as NOTUS explained, light on details about these plans.
"The question is: how much of this money are they going to channel back to the Venezuelan government, and how are they going to expect that to be used?” one anonymous local industry analyst told NOTUS. “What’s this all going to look like? They do need to get some money back into the economy, especially given the situation right now with the exchange rate and the repercussions on inflation. This is something that has probably never been seen before."