By Independent News Roundup
On Friday, 10 January, President Trump convened nearly two dozen oil and gas executives at the White House—Chevron, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Shell, and others—to pitch them on rebuilding Venezuela’s oil infrastructure following last weekend’s military operation to capture Nicolás Maduro. Trump’s apparent objective was to get the U.S. oil companies to invest $100 billion to revitalize Venezuela’s dilapidated oil infrastructure, claiming the country would offer “total safety, total security” for operations. Oil executives weren’t too enthused and that in itself has been one of history’s teachable moments. Let’s see what happened (and why):
ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods told officials Venezuela is “uninvestible” and that “a number of legal and commercial provisions would have to be established to even understand what kind of returns we would get on the investment”. Woods elaborated that significant changes must be made to commercial frameworks, the legal system, and hydrocarbon laws in the country, with durable investment protections required. For context, Exxon left Venezuela in 2007 when the Chavez regime nationalized the oil industry.
Oil fracking billionaire and major Trump donor Harold Hamm expressed skepticism: many more assurances would be needed before he could back the administration’s investment plans, describing Venezuela as having “its challenges” and noting “there’s a huge investment that needs to be done”.
Trump said the companies don’t need US federal funding but “need government protection and the government security” to operate safely in the country. Yet when pressed on specifics—whether the administration would provide a financial backstop if Venezuela destabilizes—Trump replied only that “they know the risks” and companies would be “safe”, without offering any specific commitments.
Trump signed an executive order on Friday protecting US-held money derived from sales of Venezuelan oil, and claimed Venezuela agreed the US will immediately begin refining and selling up to 50 million barrels of Venezuelan crude oil, which will continue indefinitely. But legal frameworks for long-term operations remain undefined.
Chevron, the last US company operating in Venezuela, told federal officials it sees a pathway to grow their production by 50% in the next 18 to 24 months but did not commit financially. Note the careful phrasing: expanding existing operations is vastly different from committing fresh capital to new infrastructure.
After the meeting, Chevron issued a statement thanking Trump “for his leadership and support of American energy”—the diplomatic equivalent of a handshake while backing toward the exit.
ConocoPhillips CEO Ryan Lance lauded Trump’s focus but noted his company has sought billions from Venezuela after its assets were effectively seized, describing ConocoPhillips as Venezuela’s largest non-sovereign credit holder. Trump’s response? “We’re going to start with an even plate” and “we’re not going to look at what people lost in the past”.
Translation: Companies that lost billions to Chavez-era nationalizations should eat those losses and start fresh. This is precisely the kind of arbitrary sovereign risk that makes oil majors reluctant to deploy capital.
When Energy Secretary Chris Wright was asked if any firm commitments had been made following the meeting, he told CNN there was “tremendous interest” but didn’t say that any deals had been reached. Wright said the $100 billion Trump mentioned would be what it would take to grow the country’s oil industry over the next decade if Venezuela “is peaceful and becomes a more rule of law, better operating environment”. That’s a timeline admission: decade-long horizon, conditional on political stability that doesn’t currently exist.
The meeting revealed the gap between the perceived “value” that’s available to oil corporations to exploit and the more complex realities that shape their executives’ decision making. They might like to “own” Venezuela’s oil, develop it and bring it to markets, but in reality, it would be much easier, less costly and less risky for them to simply buy that oil from Venezuela’s own oil monopoly, PEDEVESA.
It is important to take note of this because when we consider the modern history of Western colonialism, multinational corporations play a very visible role and appear, along with imperial powers’ military organizations, as the main culprits of the exploitative imperialism that often devastates their target countries while enriching the corporate executives and shareholders. But corporations - oil companies included - have options in how they can enrich themselves. To them, oil is merchandise, and their business is reselling it with a margin of profit.
How they get that oil is secondary: they can extract it themselves, or acquire it from whoever else extracts it. Their driving incentive is their profit margin. But to the financiers behind exploitative imperialism, oil is not merchandise - it’s collateral. It is to them, and only to them, that political control over a resource rich region makes all the difference: they only profit by issuing loans to their clients (like Exxon or Chevron). But to do that, they would need to have control of the underlying resources as collateral.
Had Trump assembled a meeting of oil industry’s bankers, he would have encountered much greater enthusiasm for Venezuela’s oil sector, and probably some pressure to actually change Venezuela’s regime and instill the nobel prize winner Maria Corinna Machado as president. The problem is that native populations are never content to be colonized and used as slave labor. In the good old days of colonialism, before there were social media networks, this wasn’t so difficult to solve: you’d simply depopulate the region in question and bring slave labor from elsewhere.
This is exactly how nearly 100% of the native population of the Caribbean was exterminated and replaced with slaves from Africa. Today, with millions of video cameras deployed everywhere and streamed in real time to hundreds of millions of people around the world, the problem of uppity natives is much more complicated. Especially when up to 3 million of those natives have been trained for insurgency and carry weapons.
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