New Delhi: While the Donald Trump administration has denied that oil was the central motive behind its audacious regime change operation in Venezuela, which culminated in the removal of anti US President Nicolás Maduro, scepticism remains widespread. Observers and critics, both within the United States and internationally, argue that Venezuela’s vast and largely untapped oil reserves, the largest in the world by official estimates, were a decisive underlying factor. In this reading, strategic and ideological considerations were ultimately outweighed by a more transactional calculus, with Trump’s instincts as a businessman eclipsing the administration’s stated political rationale.
For decades, Venezuela’s vast oil reserves have fuelled speculation that the country could rapidly emerge as a Saudi Arabia scale producer if sanctions are lifted and political conditions improve.
Official datasets and long-term production data, however, point to a far more constrained reality.
According to the US Energy Information Administration, Venezuela held about 303 billion barrels of proved crude oil reserves in 2023, the largest in the world and roughly 17 percent of global proved reserves.
Yet, the same EIA data shows that Venezuela accounted for less than 1 percent of global crude oil production that year, with output remaining well below 1 million barrels per day. This highlights a sharp divergence between geological potential and operational capacity.
That gap becomes clearer when Venezuela is compared with the only three countries that consistently produce around 10 million barrels per day: the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Russia, as reflected in EIA and OPEC secondary source statistics.
Significantly, each of these producers reached current output levels after decades of uninterrupted investment, relatively stable institutions, and favourable geology that allowed large volumes of oil to be produced without extensive upgrading.
Venezuela’s case is fundamentally different. Official EIA country briefs repeatedly underline that most of its reserves lie in the Orinoco Belt as extra heavy crude, which flows slowly, requires constant artificial lift, and must be diluted or upgraded before it can be transported and refined at scale. These physical characteristics impose hard limits on how quickly production can be expanded, regardless of ownership or sanctions status.
The Orinoco Belt lies in Eastern and Central Venezuela, running roughly parallel to the Orinoco River. It covers an area of about 55,000 square kilometres
Historical production data compiled by the EIA shows that even at its peak in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Venezuela produced just over 3 million barrels per day. Since then, years of underinvestment, infrastructure decay, and workforce attrition have sharply reduced capacity.
Industry assessments referenced in EIA and international agency analyses indicate that stabilising and modestly increasing production would itself require tens of billions of dollars, while any sustained expansion into the multi million barrel range would demand continuous multi billion dollar annual investment over decades.
Major components of the oil system, including pipelines, power supply, water handling, upgrading facilities, storage, and export terminals, would need to be rebuilt or newly constructed. These projects are inherently long lead and cannot be compressed into a short political or financial cycle.
On a best case assumption of sanctions being lifted, investor friendly governance, and sustained foreign participation, official production trends and long term industry projections point to a gradual trajectory rather than a step change.
If this were to happen, output could recover to roughly 1.3 to 1.5 million barrels per day in the next 5 years, potentially reach 2 to 3 million barrels per day over a decade, and perhaps approach 3 to 4 million barrels per day after twenty years of uninterrupted investment and stability.
No official dataset or widely cited forecast places Venezuela anywhere near 10 million barrels per day within a 25 year horizon.
Matching the output levels of the United States, Saudi Arabia, or Russia would require Venezuela to build upstream and midstream capacity on a scale comparable to those producers, while simultaneously overcoming the structural constraints of extra heavy crude.
The implication drawn from official EIA and OPEC aligned data is unambiguous.
Venezuela’s oil wealth represents an enormous stock of hydrocarbons in the ground, but production is a flow constrained by geology, infrastructure, human capital, and capital intensity. Even with sanctions lifted, reaching 10 million barrels per day would take more than a quarter century, require multiple hundreds of billions of dollars in cumulative investment, and remain highly uncertain.
Far from being a shortcut to rapid oil dominance, Venezuela’s reserves represent a long term, capital intensive proposition with hard physical and institutional limits.
Even assuming Venezuela could overcome these constraints by mid century, the financial logic of such an effort becomes increasingly questionable.
By 2050, most long term outlooks published by the International Energy Agency indicate that global oil demand is likely to have peaked and entered structural decline. This is driven primarily by the electrification of transport, efficiency gains, and fuel substitution.
Road transport, historically the largest source of incremental oil demand, is projected to be dominated by electric vehicles in major markets well before mid century. This sharply reduces growth in gasoline and diesel consumption even as aviation, shipping, and petrochemicals continue to rely on oil.
In such a demand environment, committing the hundreds of billions of dollars required to lift Venezuela’s output toward 10 million barrels per day would expose investors to significant long term risk.
Orinoco crude is among the most capital intensive and carbon heavy barrels on the global cost curve. It requires sustained spending on upgrading, dilution, power generation, and water handling.
By 2050, projects with long payback periods and high emissions intensity are expected to face tighter financing conditions, higher risk premiums, and increasing competition from alternative energy investments offering faster and more predictable returns.
The opportunity cost is equally significant.
Capital deployed to chase Saudi Arabia scale oil output in Venezuela could, by mid century, generate higher returns in electricity generation, grids, storage, critical minerals, or low carbon fuels that underpin electrification. Even within hydrocarbons, investors are likely to prioritise lower cost, shorter cycle projects over heavy oil developments with multi decade breakeven horizons.
Viewed through this lens, Venezuela’s reserves remain strategically relevant, but the case for transforming them into a 10 million barrels per day production system in a world moving steadily toward electric vehicles and alternative fuels appears economically weak.
While domestically, supporters of Donald Trump are likely to frame the capture of President Nicolás Maduro as another symbolic MAGA victory, the substantive economic gains from the operation, if any, are unlikely to materialise in the manner being suggested.
