Photographs by Aboodi Vesakaran / Pexels, Nikita Nikitin / Pexels, David McNew / Getty Images, Piet den Blanken / Redux
words by miranda green
I was stuck on a Caribbean tarmac not long after news broke that the United States had seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. The U.S. Virgin Island I was on was St. Thomas, known for its biodiversity, turquoise waters, and plentiful tropical drinks. It also just so happens to be about 550 miles due north of Caracas, Venezuela.
The Saturday morning news hit the region I was in especially hard.
On a small scale, the military raid caused a travel nightmare as all flights across the Caribbean were grounded for 24 hours. But as I spoke to people around me, a large number who were just now learning of Trump’s ongoing military strikes against alleged Venezuelan “drug boats,” it was clear the majority of the public didn’t know what to make of Trump’s vow that the U.S. would “run” our South American neighbor.
Was the White House’s maneuver an act of kindness to Venezuela—a country most Americans haven’t been able to visit since at least 2019, when the U.S. embassy shuttered there? Was it an act of war? And, why did we do it now?
There may not be a singular answer, but there is a glaringly obvious benefit of the seizure: Oil. Lots of it.
Venezuela has roughly one-fifth of the entire globe’s oil reserves. At one time, the U.S. and many of its oil companies were able to benefit from it. Standard Oil, Shell, and Gulf began pumping the region’s sour, sticky crude in the 1920s, making Venezuela the second-largest producer of oil outside the U.S. But political turmoil and the early markers of a failed petrostate led to the ousting of all foreign oil companies, including ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips in 2007 under then-president Hugo Chavez.
Today, it’s estimated that Venezuela’s oil production is 0.8% of global crude production and less than one-third of the 3.5 million barrels it was pumping before Chávez.
President Donald Trump is promising to change that.
When Trump took to the podium from his home at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, on Saturday to announce the details of the overnight Venezuela raid, he didn’t mince words when it came to what running the world’s single largest source of petroleum would mean for businesses.
“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, and start making money for the country,” he said.
He insinuated that the U.S. was within its rights to take back the reserves once owned by American companies abroad, adding Venezuela’s nationalization of its oil was “The greatest theft in the history of America.”
Trump did not say how that would benefit Americans. He did say the operation would make Venezuelans “rich,” but also in mid-December put a partial blockade on Venezuelan energy exports, including all sanctioned oil tankers—something economists say could worsen Venezuela’s long-standing humanitarian crisis.
Trump also promised that the oil companies would get money back that he alleged was stolen from them. For example, Conoco has outstanding claims from arbitration cases against Venezuela of about $10 billion, while Exxon’s claims are around $2 billion, CNBC reported that JPMorgan analyst Arun Jayaram told clients on Monday.
Trump’s new plans call for U.S. troops to be on the ground for an indeterminate period of time, and promise that U.S. oil companies—though it’s not clear which—will rebuild the outdated oil infrastructure.
But that will take time, and a lot of money—and it’s not known who will foot the bill.
Helima Croft, head of global commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets, told CNN that accomplishing this goal would require U.S. oil companies to play a “quasi-governmental role” to build out capacity and develop the infrastructure, which could cost $10 billion a year.
PDVSA, Venezuela’s state-owned oil and gas company, said its pipelines haven’t been updated in 50 years, which could require $58 billion in infrastructure renovations to reach peak production levels.
Trump’s announcement inferred there has been a plan in the works for some time on how best to seize Venezuela’s black gold. He said on Sunday that he spoke to all oil companies before and after the Venezuelan invasion. But finding takers apparently has not been easy. Politico reported in December that the White House was shopping the idea of returning Venezuela to American oil companies, without takers. The campaign to convince them otherwise reportedly started in full force this week.
The move will inevitably benefit some of those companies—especially Chevron—as well as certain American industries that need sour crude to produce asphalt, heating oil, and diesel. That crude is different from lighter American crude found in places such as Texas, which is largely used for gasoline.
The Trump administration claims the attack on Venezuela was about drugs. But we will soon see its future is about oil.
Critics of the military move said as much.
On the eve of her departure from Congress, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green of Georgia—who sat on the House Homeland Security Committee and was a staunch Trump supporter before splitting with the president over the Epstein Files and other disagreements—tweeted the following on Saturday:
I’ve served on the Homeland Security Committee for the past three years. I’m 100% for strong safe secure borders and stopping narco terrorists and cartels from trafficking deadly drugs and human trafficking into America.
Fentanyl is responsible for over 70% of U.S. drug…
— Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) January 3, 2026
Trump has approved at least 35 known strikes on alleged drug-smuggling vessels in the Caribbean since he took office last year. The military began seizing Venezuelan oil tankers in December.
And then, of course, there are concerns about optics: namely, how it looks for the U.S. to take over another country to extract its natural resources.
“President Trump’s launch of large‑scale military strikes in Venezuela, including the capture of President Nicolás Maduro, is a flagrant act of war and violation of international law,” Elizabeth Bast, executive director at Oil Change International, said in a statement. “This reckless aggression is part of a shameful pattern of U.S. imperialism in Latin America, where military power secures economic interests, in particular fossil fuels and critical resources.”
An increased oil supply could mean more energy sources for U.S. customers at a time when energy demand is at an all-time high.
“At the moment, U.S. refineries import heavy crude into the Gulf states via pipeline from Canada and there are also heavy crude options from Colombia and Mexico. But securing Venezuelan crude would be in addition to these, and the geographic proximity of Venezuela helps too,” Janiv Shah, a vice-president at Rystad Energy, a global consultancy, told The Guardian.
It could also bolster a struggling U.S. oil industry that, despite heavy presidential support, has floundered—recording its steepest annual fall since the COVID pandemic in 2025.
The problem? Companies are pumping more crude than needed by the global economy.
The American seizure of Venezuela and its oil operations comes just weeks after the Trump administration doubled down on attacks against existing offshore wind projects, citing national security concerns in its suspension of five projects off the East Coast. (It came after a federal judge struck down Trump’s executive order blocking wind energy projects, calling the order unlawful.)
The projects were expected to power more than 2.5 million homes and businesses, offshore wind advocacy group Turn Forward told The New York Times.
Any switch toward fossil fuel energy inevitably means a switch toward more emissions, whether the product is ultimately shipped to the U.S. or elsewhere.
Many of Venezuela’s oil facilities are also within 30 miles of protected areas, and frequent oil spills have contaminated drinking water in some parts of the country, according to a 2022 report from the U.S. Agency for International Development. PDVSA said it had 46,820 spills between 2010 and 2016.
What does this mean for the environment and climate? That’s not hard to guess.
Venezuela’s thick, sulfur-rich oil is considered some of the world’s dirtiest. It has a higher carbon content than conventional crude, Clayton Seigle at the Center for Strategic and International Studies told the Times. Venezuela is one of the most carbon-intensive oil producers because a large amount of energy is needed to extract its heavy oil, which leads to higher greenhouse gas emissions per barrel of oil produced.
Venezuela in 2023 was also the fifth-highest flaring country. Flaring is when oil refineries must burn off excess methane into the air. Methane is a major greenhouse gas that traps about 80 times as much heat in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, and flaring events—of significant environmental concern—are only used by refineries in emergency scenarios.
There could be a slight upside with the U.S. taking control, in that flaring and spill events might diminish, one expert told the Times.
It’s important to remember that Trump’s key donors made their billions in the oil and gas industry. He received about $14.1 million from the industry in 2024—his fourth-biggest source of cash. Even before he came to office, it was revealed that Trump had closed-door meetings with gas executives where he railed against wind energy.
Since the U.S. seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, oil stocks are up.
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The US Just Bet on the World’s Dirtiest Oil
