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US President Donald Trump will hold talks with leaders of major American oil corporations on Friday, seeking to persuade them to back his initiatives in Venezuela, a nation whose energy reserves he claims he intends to control for the foreseeable future.
US forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro during a large-scale military operation on January 3, with Trump openly saying that the management of Venezuela’s oil was core to his actions.
Washington currently holds “maximum leverage over the interim authorities in Venezuela,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt stated, confirming the meeting with top oil industry executives.
“We will be meeting tomorrow with all the major oil industry leaders; they will be right here at the White House,” Trump said in an interview aired by Fox News on Thursday night.
The Trump administration has repeatedly said that it is running Venezuela, with Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Wednesday stressing that Washington will control the country’s oil industry “indefinitely.”
Venezuelan interim President Delcy Rodriguez, who was Maduro’s deputy, has said her government remains in charge, while the state-run oil firm said only that it was in negotiations with the United States on oil sales.
Reports say that the heads of ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips are expected to attend the White House meeting.
“It’s just a meeting to discuss, obviously, the immense opportunity that is before these oil companies right now,” Trump’s spokesperson Leavitt told reporters Wednesday.
Chevron is the only US company currently licensed to operate in Venezuela. ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips left the country in 2007 after refusing then-President Hugo Chavez’s demand that they give up a majority stake in their local operations to the government.
Sanctioned by Washington since 2019, Venezuela sits on about a fifth of the world’s oil reserves and was once a major crude supplier to the United States. But it accounted for only around one per cent of the world’s total crude output in 2024, according to OPEC, having been hampered by years of underinvestment, sanctions, and embargoes.
Trump sees the country’s massive oil reserves as a windfall in his fight to further lower US domestic fuel prices, a major political issue.
But he could face an uphill task convincing the major US oil companies to invest in Venezuela due to uncertainty about governance post-Maduro, security and the massive expense of restoring production facilities.
