Trump’s $100 billion Venezuela pitch meets oil industry skepticism

President Donald Trump on Friday urged nearly 20 American oil executives to invest a combined $100 billion in rebuilding Venezuela’s decrepit energy infrastructure, presenting the plan as a way to drive down global oil prices and ease costs for American consumers.

But oil industry leaders have expressed deep skepticism about pouring substantial capital into Venezuela, where profitability and government stability remain deeply uncertain. Several energy giants have lost billions of dollars in previous Venezuelan ventures, and executives in attendance on Friday said they would need to see “significant” changes in the country before they could invest. 

“You can imagine to re-enter [Venezuela] a third time would require some pretty significant changes from what we’ve historically seen here and what is currently the state,” Exxon Mobil CEO Darren Woods said at the White House meeting. “Venezuela today, it’s uninvestible, and so significant changes have to be made to those commercial frameworks, the legal system.” 

Asked what backstops would be implemented to prevent oil companies from losing billions if Venezuela becomes unstable, Trump said that the companies “know the risks.” 

Trump’s proposal envisions top executives from Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Shell and other major oil companies dramatically boosting Venezuelan oil production to reduce global prices to around $50 per barrel.

“The plan is for them to spend — meaning our giant oil companies will be spending at least $100 billion of their money, not the government’s money,” Trump said in the East Room on Friday. “They don’t need government money, but they need government protection and need government security.” 

Trump attempted to assuage industry concerns by promising them “total safety” and “total security” if they agreed to drill in Venezuela, and said companies would “mostly be using Venezuelan workers” on the ground. But those promises lacked specifics about how such guarantees would be enforced.

Trump’s vision includes routing revenue from the sale of Venezuelan oil sales into accounts controlled by the U.S. government. In a New York Times interview on Wednesday, Trump said the United States could quickly generate vast oil revenues in Venezuela and would maintain control over that nation’s government for “much longer” than a year.

Earlier this week, the White House announced an agreement with Caracas that will require Venezuela to export up to 50 million barrels of oil to the United States. Revenue from the oil, Trump said, will be “used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States.” 

The United Nations, along with other international allies, have criticized Trump’s stated goals as interference in the affairs of a sovereign nation. U.S. officials and election experts have long accused ousted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro of election fraud and classified his government as illegitimate.

At the Friday meeting, Trump also spoke openly about acquiring other countries’ territory, warning that if the U.S. doesn’t “take Greenland” — a self-governing territory of Denmark, a NATO member and U.S. ally — then China or Russia would move in. He suggested it could be acquired “the easy way or the hard way.” A takeover of Greenland could threaten the existence of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which has undergirded the post-World War II security of the Western world.