White House Details Trump’s Venezuela Oil Deal Terms
The White House on Monday released a fact sheet detailing the terms of President Donald Trump’s sweeping oil agreement with Venezuela, revealing that the U.S. is partnering with North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP) in a deal that will give the Pentagon a 35% ownership stake in roughly a fifth of the country’s vast oil reserves. The announcement comes days after Trump described the arrangement as “THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY” on social media.
According to AP News, Venezuela’s acting President Delcy Rodriguez is granting NABEP 100-year rights over 17 oil fields with proven reserves of approximately 65 billion barrels. Many of those fields were previously owned or operated by Russian or Chinese firms, the White House said. The agreement was signed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
The Deal’s Key Terms
The arrangement creates a private joint venture between the U.S. government and NABEP, which is owned by Venezuelan businessman Alejandro Betancourt and is already the second-largest oil operator in Venezuela behind Chevron, producing approximately 200,000 barrels per day. The Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital will receive a 35% ownership stake in the company, while the State Department gets a guaranteed right to purchase 20% of output at cost and a right of first refusal on the remaining 80%.
The White House said the deal is at zero cost to the U.S. and gives the government veto power over board appointments, with a majority of NABEP’s board required to be U.S. citizens. NABEP has agreed to invest up to $100 billion in new oil infrastructure in Venezuela, and the deal is expected to yield over $209 billion in taxes for Venezuela over the first 25 years.
The company would become the second-largest corporate holder of proven reserves after Saudi Aramco, according to U.S. officials. The U.S. currently has approximately 46 billion barrels of proven territorial reserves, meaning this deal would more than double that figure. Venezuela holds an estimated 303 billion barrels of crude oil in the ground — about 17% of the world’s supply.
Context: From Maduro’s Capture to the Oil Deal
The agreement represents the culmination of a dramatic geopolitical shift that began in January, when U.S. military forces captured then-President Nicolas Maduro in a special forces raid on Caracas. Maduro was brought to New York to face federal narcoterrorism and drug trafficking charges, and Rodriguez assumed power as acting president with U.S. backing. She subsequently signed a law opening Venezuela’s oil sector to privatization, reversing a bedrock tenet of the socialist movement that had ruled the country for more than two decades.
Trump has framed the deal as part of a broader effort to secure American energy dominance and reduce dependence on foreign oil amid the ongoing U.S.-Israel war against Iran, which has choked global oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict has driven U.S. gas prices to a national average of $4.08 per gallon, a 28% increase over the past year, according to AAA. The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve has fallen below 300 million barrels, its lowest level since 1983.
Skepticism from Analysts and Lawmakers
The sweeping agreement has been met with skepticism from energy analysts who note that Venezuela’s dilapidated infrastructure will take years and billions of dollars to repair. Kevin Book, managing director at ClearView Energy Partners, told Al Jazeera that “it’s going to take time — many years — to deploy that much capital and produce the kind of incremental results that history suggests possible.”
Amy Myers Jaffe, director of the Energy, Climate Justice and Sustainability Lab at New York University, said the deal could be “helpful in the long run, but it’s not going to do anything to change the price of gasoline at the retail station for Labor Day weekend.”
Even Trump acknowledged Monday that Americans won’t see immediate relief at the pump. Asked about a timeline, he said “it could be a little bit” for prices to fall, and played down analyst predictions that it could take years. “If it was two years, you know, that’s a short period of time,” he said.
On Capitol Hill, lawmakers from both parties are demanding more information. Rep. Rick Crawford, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said he wanted details from the administration “hopefully sooner rather than later.” Sen. Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, called the deal “a blatant abuse of power and taxpayer dollars.”
Venezuelan Reaction and Political Implications
The deal has provoked outrage in Venezuela, where protests broke out in Caracas with banners reading “We are neither a colony, nor a back yard” and “Yankees go home!” Rafael Ramirez, the former head of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company PDVSA, accused Rodriguez’s administration of “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the homeland” with what he called a “neocolonial” transaction, as The Guardian reported.
Rodriguez has defended the deal in a televised address, insisting that “Venezuela retains ownership and sovereignty over its resources.” She said the country wants to become “an energy powerhouse, a major oil producer, a significant gas exporter, and a major national petrochemical developer.”
Betancourt, the 46-year-old businessman at the center of the deal, has faced money laundering investigations in the U.S., Spain, and Switzerland, and was arrested twice in the UK in 2025 on extradition requests. He was never formally charged or convicted. He made his fortune through Derwick Associates, which won contracts to build power plants under Chavez’s government following a power crisis in the late 2000s, according to Al Jazeera’s profile.
What’s Next
Trump plans to meet with oil refiners on Tuesday to discuss increasing America’s refining capacity, with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and Jarrod Agen of the White House National Energy Dominance Council also attending. The administration sees the need for more refineries to process oil from Venezuela.
However, significant questions remain about the deal’s legal authority, the breakdown of the U.S. government’s effective 55% output share, and whether major American oil companies will be willing to invest given the political uncertainty. Bob McNally, a former energy adviser to President George W. Bush, cautioned that “investors will remain cautious even if the terms of the deal, once released, pass legal muster. A future president could withdraw, and Caracas has twice thrown foreign investors out.”
As the administration pushes forward with its energy agenda, the Venezuela deal represents one of the most consequential — and controversial — foreign energy arrangements in recent American history. Whether it delivers on its promise of lower gas prices and a refilled strategic reserve, or becomes another chapter in the complex history of U.S.-Venezuela relations, will depend on factors that extend far beyond the terms of the agreement itself.