Trump says US has entered deal with Venezuela to take control of 65 billion barrels of oil reserves

President Trump announced on August 28 that the US had struck what he called the "biggest oil deal in world history" with Venezuela, giving Washington majority (55%) control through a joint venture with a private operator over 65 billion barrels across 17 strategic oil fields -- roughly a fifth of Venezuela's total reserves, the world's largest at an estimated 303 billion barrels -- under a 100-year concession. The deal, negotiated by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth with Venezuela's US-backed interim President Delcy Rodriguez (installed after US forces captured President Nicolas Maduro in a January 3 raid and flew him to New York to face narcoterrorism charges), was framed by Trump as a way to more than double US oil reserves and cut American gas prices amid a price spike driven by Iran's six-month closure of the Strait of Hormuz; Rodriguez said it would bring over $100 billion in investment and $209 billion in tax revenue to Venezuela over 25 years and aimed to raise output to 1.5 million barrels per day.

The arrangement drew skepticism from energy analysts and legal experts, who called it unprecedented for a foreign government to lease and directly operate another sovereign nation's oil fields, questioned whether it violated Venezuela's constitution, and noted its heavy, hard-to-refine crude is poorly suited to US gasoline production; Venezuelan opposition figure Henrique Capriles cited the government's "opacity and corruption" in demanding an explanation of its legal basis, and no official text of the agreement was published. Critics, including energy historians, compared it to early-20th-century colonial oil concessions, noting Trump has separately floated seizing oil from Iran's Strait of Hormuz and previously argued the US should have "taken the oil" from Libya and Iraq, framing the Venezuela deal as a model for his broader "Donroe Doctrine" assertion of US dominance over the Western Hemisphere.