President Donald Trump on Saturday said the US would take control of Venezuela’s massive oil reserves and recruit American companies to invest billions of dollars to refurbish the country’s gutted oil industry.
Venezuela is sitting on a massive 303 billion barrels worth of crude — about a fifth of the world’s global reserves, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). That trove of crude will play a central role in the country’s future.
Oil futures don’t trade on the weekend, so the near-term impact on the price of oil is a bit of a guessing game, but Trump said the US would operate the Venezuelan government for the time being.
“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies — the biggest anywhere in the world — go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure,” Trump said at a news conference at Mar-a-Lago.
A US-led revamp could eventually make Venezuela a much bigger supplier of oil and could create opportunities for Western oil companies and could serve as a new source of production. It could also keep broader prices in check, although lower prices might disincentivize some US companies from producing oil.
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