The inside story on the historic U.S.-Venezuela oil deal and how it will work

How the U.S.-Venezuela oil deals work — and what comes next Inside Venezuela’s new U.S.-backed oil deals. Why oil above $100 and diesel near $6 are putting refining capacity in focus. The Wall Street outlook for crude, energy stocks, inflation, and interest rates. What I'm hearing from energy insiders It was one of the most eye-opening and fascinating business trips in my 30-year career: the opportunity to travel to Venezuela to witness firsthand the signing of oil deals between the government in Caracas and Venezuelan and Western oil companies. CNBC was one of just a handful of news organizations allowed to travel to Caracas with the U.S. secretary of energy. The trip was barely 24 hours long and was tightly scheduled. Venezuela is not a country where the American media is just going to wander around. It is one of the poorest countries in the world, and that was obvious the moment we landed. The airport was still shut down due to the effects of a terrible earthquake that hit back in June. More on that in a minute. We were one of the only planes to land at Simón Bolívar International Airport and took a 20-minute bus ride downtown. You could see the remains of wealth the country and its people once had. Many of the buildings downtown and in the business district appear to have been built in the 1980s or 1990s, when the country had more than its share of oil and energy riches. Venezuela oil production peaked out in 1997 at about 3.5 million barrels per day. Then strongman dictator Hugo Chavez took over and, between him and jailed president Nicolas Maduro, they succeeded in stripping the proud nation of most of that money. Oil production collapsed to under 1 million barrels per day in much of 2025. It's only recently gone back above 1 million barrels a day. While many Russian and Chinese firms got richer, the Venezuelan people got poorer. Enter the United States and the agreements it signed last week. That clears a few things up about what these deals are … and what they are not. What they are is a variety of deals, not just one. Chevron is making its own deal in Venezuela, expanding production in a nation it's operated in for over 100 years. That is separate and distinct from the other agreements. Those deals primarily involve the U.S. government taking a stake in a private operating oil company called North American Blue Energy Partners . Better known as NABEP, the company is run by the rather mysterious oil investor Alejandro Betancourt. Betancourt has taken his lumps in the media, as it's been widely reported that he was investigated for potential financial crimes in Switzerland. That said, our conversations with the U.S. government and others focused on the fact that, despite the investigations, charges were not brought. Whatever your take may be on Betancourt and his past, U.S. and other officials we spoke with added that, unfortunately, in volatile, complicated, and often dangerous countries such as Venezuela, oftentimes the operators you have to deal with are not without some warts. The American government is taking a stake in NABEP and will trade that investment for future oil production. That is really the key point in all this: Will these bold and potentially risky new investments — made with NABEP, Italian energy giant ENI, and private American companies like Aspect Energy — result in meaningful new production growth? When we spoke with U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, he was confident that production in Venezuela could quickly scale up by a couple hundred thousand barrels per day. Between that, along with the increased Chevron investment of about $7 billion across three different projects, there is cautious optimism that Venezuela could ...