After seizing Maduro, Trump wants Venezuela’s oil. He will face logistical and legal hurdles

U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan to take control of Venezuela’s oil industry and ask American companies to revitalize it after capturing leader Nicolas Maduro in a raid is likely to face many hurdles — logistically, legally and politically.

The dramatic seizure of the Maduros capped an intensive Trump administration pressure campaign on Venezuela’s autocratic leader and months of secret planning, resulting in the most assertive American action to achieve regime change since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Washington has indicted Maduro on narco-terrorism charges, but the Venezuelan government has said for months that Trump and the U.S. were seeking to take the country’s vast natural resources.

Venezuela is known to have the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves of approximately 303 billion barrels, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That’s more than either Canada or Saudi Arabia, and accounts for roughly 17 per cent of all global oil reserves.

But even with those massive reserves, Venezuela has been producing less than 1 per cent of the world’s crude oil supply.

Venezuela saw production steadily decline from the 3.5 million barrels per day pumped in 1999 to today’s level of about a million barrels per day.

There are various reasons for the decline, and many roadblocks to overcome for Trump to fulfill his desire to export Venezuela’s oil.

Infrastructure

Heather Exner-Pirot, director of energy, natural resources and environment at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, told CBC News on Sunday that production in Venezuela has “atrophied” due to nationalization, mismanagement and corruption.

Venezuela has also been hit by heavy U.S. sanctions — first put in place in 2015 after it deemed Caracas a national security threat — including a total blockade recently imposed by Washington.

El Palito refinery is seen behind a beach in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, in December 2025. (Matias Delacroix/The Associated Press)

“The oil sector is going to take years, if not a decade or more, to come back,” Roxanna Vigil, an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told CBC News on Saturday, adding it would take tens of billions of dollars to remedy.

There’s also a brain drain of skilled workers in the sector after then-president Hugo Chavez fired thousands of workers from the state-owned Petroleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA) in reaction to a 2003 strike.

“That’s why we went to Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Canada, the U.S.,” chemical engineer Lino Carrillo, who worked for PDVSA for 22 years, told CBC News.

Trump said Saturday he will allow “very large United states oil companies” into Venezuela, who he said will spend the necessary billions to “fix the badly broken infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”

Political

It’s not just the infrastructure that’s in “bad shape,” said Francisco Monaldi, director of the Latin American energy program at Rice University in Texas.

“It’s mostly about how do you get foreign companies to start pouring money in before they have a clear perspective on the political stability, the contract situation and the like,” Monaldi told The Associated Press.

Vigil said Venezuela would need to re-write its constitution to be more “business-friendly” and the entire economy would need to re-oriented away from socialism.

Back in 2007, Chavez nationalized much of the oil production and forced major players like ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips out.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Sunday that the U.S. would not take a day-to-day role in governing Venezuela outside enforcing an existing “oil quarantine” on the country as leverage to push for policy changes in Caracas.

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, left, is seen with Maduro, then foreign minister, at a summit in Argentina in May 2010. (Natacha Pisarenko/The Associated Press)

But Delcy Rodriguez, Venezuela’s vice-president whom the country’s top court named acting president, has called for Maduro’s release and gave no signs that she would be co-operating with Washington.

“What is being done to Venezuela is an atrocity that violates international law,” Rodriguez said in a speech on Saturday.

Trump said Rodriguez may pay a bigger price than Maduro “if she doesn’t do what’s right,” according to an interview with The Atlantic magazine on Sunday.

“I just don’t think a publicly-traded company, that has to report to a board and to shareholders, is going to … chomp at the bit to get into Venezuela right now,” Exner-Pirot said.

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Experts say a new government would need to be installed in Venezuela for oil to start flowing at the level it once did and that Canada could avoid the threat of competition by pursuing new pipelines to carry Canadian oil to the coasts and not the U.S.

Legal

Legal experts raised questions about the lawfulness of Saturday’s U.S. operation, which was done without congressional approval. Similar questions surround Trump’s ambitions for Venezuelan oil.

Exner-Pirot said there is historical, if not legal, precedent for U.S. actions in Venezuela, noting there was “so much interference” by the U.S. in the Middle East.

Matthew Waxman, a Columbia University law professor who was a national security official in the George W. Bush administration, told The Associated Press “an occupying military power can’t enrich itself by taking another state’s resources.”

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Waxman could be referring to UN Resolution 1803, which states people and nations have “permanent sovereignty” over their natural resources, and foreign investments can only be undertaken if said peoples and nations “freely” enter into agreements with international companies.

Although the U.S. is not currently occupying Venezuela, and Rubio signaled Washington will take an arms-length approach, the U.S. has been building up a military presence in the region for weeks and Trump repeatedly said it will “run” the country.

“[Another] big issue will be who really owns Venezuela’s oil?” Waxman wrote in an email.

“The Trump administration will probably claim that the Venezuelan government never rightfully held them.”

Indeed, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, said on social media on Dec. 17 that “American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela,” likely referring to U.S. investments in the early 20th century, and that the industry was “pillaged” by Venezuelan regimes.