The Trump administration’s new partner in Venezuela stands to vastly expand its reach in the country’s most important oil basins as part of an unorthodox deal announced last week.
Yet meaningfully increasing production from those areas will be expensive and time consuming for North American Blue Energy Partners, Venezuela’s second-largest private oil producer and the U.S. government’s partner.
Roughly half of the 17 production areas covered under the deal are in Lake Maracaibo, according to a project list obtained and independently corroborated by The New York Times. The lake is a longstanding oil-producing area in the northwestern corner of the country that has fallen into disrepair.
The other half are sprinkled throughout an oil-rich cradle called the Orinoco Belt, much of it a savanna that stretches across central and northeastern Venezuela. Most of the country’s oil reserves are buried there, but that crude is the consistency of asphalt. Transforming it into a liquid that can be piped is expensive.
Many of the areas in the Orinoco made available to North American Blue Energy under the deal are also largely undeveloped, so in addition to drilling new wells, the company most likely would have to invest in infrastructure like pipelines and processing facilities.
“This is a huge amount of money that’s needed, and then you need the people, too — it’s not just the steel and the pipe and the engineering,” said Bob Fryklund, a vice president at S&P Global Energy, a research firm.
The Trump administration, its partner and the Venezuelan authorities have released few details about this highly unusual deal in which the U.S. government is exerting outsized control over oil in another country.
They have said the 17 areas hold 65 billion barrels of recoverable oil but had not published a list of the areas or their locations, making it impossible to verify those claims. As it is, Venezuela’s reserve estimates are widely considered to be overly optimistic.
North American Blue Energy, which is led by Venezuelan businessman Alejandro Betancourt, already operates in three of the 17 areas, pumping around 200,000 barrels of oil a day.
The company aims to increase that to one million barrels a day in the next five years, The Times has reported. Delcy Rodríguez, Venezuela’s interim president, recently set the goal for the areas covered by the deal even higher: more than 1.5 million barrels a day.
By comparison, the U.S. oil giant Chevron, which is more experienced in Venezuela, outlined a much slower pace of development in a separate deal announced on Wednesday. The company plans to increase its output by roughly 320,000 barrels a day over five years, at a cost of $7 billion.
Mr. Betancourt’s company is “setting the goal, the bar, super high,” said Adrian Lara, an analyst at the research firm Wood Mackenzie. “The pace of reaching that is probably very challenging.”
Venezuela as a whole is currently producing a little more than one million barrels a day.
North American Blue Energy said the deal with the Trump administration was “a factor” in why the company was “chosen for these fields.”
Sara Chouraqui, the company’s general counsel, said in a statement that the company had a “proven track record” and had operations near some of the 17 areas, which would allow it to move quickly.
The Trump administration has cast its deal with Mr. Betancourt as extending U.S. influence in a country where Chinese and Russian companies once exerted considerable control.
However, tracing the history of Venezuela’s oil fields and the firms involved in them over time can be challenging. The country has not made up-to-date records public, and Venezuela recently redefined some production areas, analysts say.
A document reviewed by The Times showed that China Concord Petroleum was participating in at least two of the 17 areas in 2024. A company by that name was placed under U.S. sanctions in 2019 for alleged involvement in transporting Iranian oil.
China Concord Petroleum, which could not be reached for comment, is based in Hong Kong, according to WireScreen, a business that provides information about Chinese companies.
When asked about Chinese investments in Venezuela, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry said that “China’s legitimate rights and interests in Venezuela must be guaranteed.”
A representative for the Venezuelan government did not respond to a request for comment.
A major challenge for oil companies will be a dilapidated electric grid. Years of mismanagement and corruption mean that power outages are common. Franco Sampieri, who leads the oil chamber in Zulia State, whose capital is Maracaibo, said the city regularly experienced blackouts that last for hours.
Operators will have to find reliable power for pumps and other equipment.
Lake Maracaibo, which adjoins the country’s second largest city, was once the crown jewel of Venezuela’s oil boom. But after years of neglect, it is littered with rusted oil rigs and broken pipes. Birds that land on the lake often get covered in so much oil that they struggle to take off again. Many oil workers have emigrated, while those who remain find it hard to make a living.
Reporting was contributed by Murphy Zhao, Genevieve Glatsky, Edward Wong, Aaron Krolik and Daniel Wood.
