The oil agreements signed in Caracas last week are not a single deal but a patchwork of them, and understanding the distinctions matters for anyone trying to judge what U.S. involvement in Venezuela’s energy sector will actually produce.
CNBC traveled to Caracas with the U.S. secretary of energy as one of only a handful of news organizations granted access for the signing, a tightly scheduled trip of barely 24 hours. Simón Bolívar International Airport was still shut to most traffic following a devastating earthquake in June, and the drive downtown passed buildings that appear to date from the 1980s and 1990s, when the country’s oil wealth was at its height.
The numbers tell the story of the decline. Venezuelan production peaked in 1997 at roughly 3.5 million barrels per day. Under Hugo Chávez and the jailed president Nicolás Maduro, output collapsed to under 1 million barrels per day through much of 2025, only recently climbing back above that threshold.
What the deals actually are
The Chevron agreement stands apart from the rest. The company is expanding production in a country where it has operated for more than a century. Separately, the U.S. government is taking a stake in a private operating company called North American Blue Energy Partners, better known as NABEP, run by oil investor Alejandro Betancourt. Under the structure, Washington trades that investment for future oil production.
Betancourt has drawn press scrutiny over a Swiss investigation into potential financial crimes that ultimately produced no charges, according to the CNBC report. U.S. and other officials CNBC spoke with acknowledged that operators in volatile and often dangerous jurisdictions rarely come without complications.
Other participants include Italian energy major ENI and private American firms such as Aspect Energy. The central question running through all of it: will these investments translate into meaningful new barrels?
How high could output climb
U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright told CNBC he was confident Venezuela could add a couple hundred thousand barrels per day in short order. Combined with Chevron’s roughly $7 billion of investment across three projects, that has produced cautious optimism that the country could return to 2 million barrels per day relatively soon.
If it does, the deals are structured so that a portion of proceeds and tax revenue flows back to the Venezuelan people rather than being diverted by overseas actors, according to the CNBC account.
The report also pushed back on the charge that the United States is simply taking Venezuelan oil or engaging in a new colonialism, framing the arrangements as deals with private operators aimed at selling more crude into global markets. Officials pointed to years of Russian, Chinese and Cuban involvement, which they said captured most of the oil for those countries’ benefit and in some cases caused environmental damage.
Venezuela lacks the capital to rebuild its energy industry alone, the report noted, meaning outside money, technical expertise and manpower will be required regardless of who provides it.
The market backdrop
The deals land in a restive oil market. Brent and U.S. crude have been trading above $100, with diesel at $6 per gallon in the U.S. for the first time, while volumes through the Strait of Hormuz remain well below pre-war levels and some ship captains are reluctant to re-enter the Arabian Gulf.
The deeper constraint, according to the report, is refining capacity rather than crude supply. The U.S. has not built a major refinery since the 1970s, and Gulf refineries face shipping and export risks. That dynamic has lifted both oil and gas shares and refining stocks, with the weakest refiner up 47% since July 1 and the strongest more than 20 percentage points beyond that, leaving many names at or above Wall Street price targets.
On the macro side, JPMorgan has raised the possibility that markets are growing inured to a lasting conflict, with Brent averaging $87 next year. Analyst Natasha Kaneva argued the futures curve sits about $6 too high at the front and $10 too low at the back, noting that global demand is roughly 5 million barrels per day below recent highs, partly on weaker Chinese consumption. Barclays struck a far more bullish tone, calling the outlook for global energy the most attractive in two decades as demand for oil, gas, electricity and renewables rises together.
Source: www.cnbc.com — https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/11/the-inside-story-on-the-historic-us-venezuela-oil-deal-and-how-it-will-work.html
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