Thursday, January 15, 2026 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
It
didn’t take long this year for the Trump administration to remind us
about its appetite for government stakes — and Venezuela could be the
next frontier in its growing
portfolio. The latest example came from Energy
Secretary Chris Wright, one of the top officials taking point in
cajoling Western oil executives to invest in Venezuela. During a Sunday interview with CBS’s Face the Nation,
he was asked if the U.S. is considering taking stakes in the Venezuelan
oil sector. He said it’s “certainly a very real possibility” in the
aftermath of the U.S. ouster of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. That
doesn’t come as a big surprise. The Trump administration has been on an
acquisition spree much of the past year, taking direct stakes in 14
companies spanning steel, rare earth minerals, semiconductors, and
nuclear energy, according to Scott Lincicome of the Cato Institute. More are surely on the way in 2026, and it’s not hard to imagine Venezuela’s crippled oil sector catching Trump’s eye. Many Republicans have long been aghast at Trump’s move to make the U.S. government a shareholder in the private sector.
They view it as anathema to the free market principles underpinning the party since the 1960s. “I'm
a free market conservative, and I don't see how anybody can argue that
is a conservative position,” North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis told Quartz
Washington last month. “Does anybody really believe if we take a 10%
stake in a company that any other board members vote matters but ours?
... It’s a slippery slope.” If the Trump
administration does take a stake in Venezuela’s state-owned oil company
Petróleos de Venezuela, U.S. officials must contend with the post-Maduro
government that’s still led by most of the same socialist,
authoritarian officials as before. Venezuela racked up a history of
state-backed confiscation that started under Maduro’s predecessor Hugo
Chávez. In 2010, Chávez once gave the order
for several jewelry stores in Caracas to
be expropriated, all on a whim during a live TV broadcast. Three years
earlier, Chavez’s nationalization spree reached the Venezuelan oil
sector. Rather than accept smaller stakes in oil projects without
getting compensated, ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips left the country.
They sued the Venezuela government on their way out. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Trump during a meeting with oil industry executives at the White House last week. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Uninvestable’The
uncertainty surrounding Venezuela’s future has chilled enthusiasm among
major Western oil executives, most of whom are reluctant to join
President Donald Trump in
his crusade to reboot Venezuelan oil. It was evident at the White House meeting last week when ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods described current conditions in Venezuela as “uninvestable.” It
probably angered the president, who left empty-handed without the
flashy type of business deal he built a political identity on. Two days
later, Trump flirted with shutting out ExxonMobil following Woods’ blunt comments. He also issued an executive order walling off Venezuelan oil revenue deposited in U.S. held-accounts from claims by Western creditors. For now, U.S. oil producers are quelling talk of a federal backstop for possible spending in Venezuela. “We
do not think that it is
necessary for there to be financial support for the industry to go into
Venezuela,” American Petroleum Institute President Mike Sommers told me
this week. “I think what we're interested in is a stable government, a
secure security for an American workforce that would go in there, [for]
rule of law and capitalism to flourish.” The American Petroleum Institute — the chief lobbying group for the U.S. oil sector — hosted its annual
State of American Energy in Washington on Tuesday. Sommers and industry
executives argued that U.S. prosperity still hinges on the success of
the oil and gas sector, with no peak in energy demand anytime soon. When
it comes to Venezuela, they laid out conditions that must be met for
hefty investments to be considered, including rule of law, stability,
and long-term certainty that workers won’t be endangered or their
equipment seized. Sommers
dumped cold water on the idea of U.S. government stakes. He later
identified Lake Maracaibo and the Orinoco Belt as the primary areas that oil firms had interest in redeveloping. Earlier this week, Trump reposted on social media
a meme that referred to him as Venezuela’s “Acting President.” But it
might be more accurate to call him the Gatekeeper-in-Chief. “In
my 25 years of covering energy and working in geopolitics, it's kind of
hard to find another example of this type of brazen energy statecraft,”
said Carolyn Kisseau, an energy professor at New York University. “It's
a very bold, almost weaponized resource statecraft, in terms of
this idea that not only can we extract the resources, we will control
the extraction of the resources.” —Joseph Zeballos-Roig Joseph Zeballos-Roig is Quartz’s Washington Correspondent. Email him at jzeballos-roig@qz.com and follow him on X at @josephzeballos. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||