‘If you want to go in…’: Oil chiefs express caution as Trump pushes oil plan – what happened at the meeting & more related News Here

US President Donald Trump spoke with senior oil executives on Friday (local time), urging them to consider investing in Venezuela’s oil sector following the capture of President Nicolas Maduro. While Trump presented the country as newly safe and open for business, industry leaders reacted cautiously, with one prominent executive saying that without deep reforms Venezuela remains “investable.”Speaking at the White House, Trump said his administration would take responsibility for deciding which companies are allowed to operate in Venezuela, keeping Caracas out of the process. He argued that foreign companies had previously been operating without adequate protection under Maduro and claimed that the situation had now fundamentally changed.

“We’re going to decide which oil companies are going to get in… (we’re) going to make deals with the companies,” Trump said. “But now you have total security. It’s a completely different Venezuela.”Trump said the oil companies would “deal with us directly”, indicating that Washington would manage access to Venezuela’s oil resources and cut the country out of negotiations.However, ExxonMobil Chief Executive Darren Woods expressed serious doubts about returning to the country, citing the company’s history of asset seizures.“We have had our assets there seized twice and so, as you can imagine, re-entering for a third time will require some significant changes,” Woods said. “If we look at the legal and commercial constructs and frameworks that exist in Venezuela today – it is not investable.”The meeting came days after US forces captured Maduro, an action which Trump openly linked to Venezuela’s oil wealth. He said discussions with officials would focus on rapidly restoring the country’s deteriorating oil infrastructure and increasing production by millions of barrels per day.Attendees included Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, as well as executives from Chevron, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Halliburton, Valero, Marathon, Shell, Trafigura, Vitol America and Repsol.A ConocoPhillips spokesman said Chief Executive Ryan Lance valued the conversations around “making Venezuela ready for investment.”After the meeting, Trump said the participants had “kind of reached an agreement”, although he did not provide details. He claimed that companies were ready to invest “at least $100 billion” in the country.Venezuela’s plan to revive its oil industry faces major obstacles, analysts told AFP. He said the size of the country’s reserves does not guarantee quick or profitable production, pointing to aging infrastructure, political risks, expensive crude extraction and growing investor caution as the world moves away from fossil fuels.“There’s a lot of talk about the size of the reserves – 300 billion barrels of proven reserves – but what’s often missing from the conversation is how realistic it is to extract it economically,” said Rich Collett-White, energy analyst at Carbon Tracker.Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who previously said the US would control Venezuela’s oil industry “indefinitely”, acknowledged after the talks that rebuilding the sector “will take time.”Meanwhile, Venezuelan interim President Delsey Rodriguez said her government was in control of the country, while the state oil company said it was in talks with Washington.Chevron is currently the only US company licensed to operate in Venezuela. ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips walked out of the country in 2007 after rejecting then-President Hugo Chávez’s demand to give majority control to the state.Trump also said in a social media post that he had canceled a second round of strikes on Venezuela, which he described as “cooperation” from the country.Venezuela has been under US sanctions since 2019 and has about a fifth of the world’s oil reserves. Despite this, according to OPEC, after years of underinvestment, embargoes and sanctions, its share of global crude oil production in 2024 was only one percent.Trump sees Venezuela’s oil wealth as a potential boost to his efforts to further lower fuel prices in the United States.