How One Oil Company Got a Head Start in Venezuela

The Trump administration wants the oil majors to rebuild the nation’s energy industry. Chevron has been on the ground there for decades.

With Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro in a jail cell in New York, Donald Trump moved on to the next stage of his plan for the South American nation. The US president, having launched a surprise attack to capture Maduro, said he wants oil majors (and possibly US taxpayers) to invest billions of dollars in reviving Venezuela’s energy industry. Though it’s unclear what the companies will do, there’s one that’s already on the ground—and has been for a long time.

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Houston-based Chevron has been operating in Venezuela in some form for almost a century. In recent decades it’s found itself caught in a tug-of-war between Washington and Caracas as authoritarian leader Hugo Chávez, and later Maduro, pushed back against US sanctions. Now it seems Chevron is in the catbird seat as Trump tries to take over the country’s energy industry. In this Bloomberg Originals weekly documentary, we explain Chevron’s history in Venezuela and what it may mean for Trump’s plan.

Venezuela’s massive oil reserves long have attracted international oil companies, with discoveries there helping propel an era of wealth in the country. When Chávez, a former military officer imprisoned for a failed coup d’etat, won the presidency in 1998, he passed a number of laws requiring the state own more than half of any joint venture with foreign companies. Two of the largest investors, ConocoPhillips and Exxon, refused the new terms and exited in early 2000s. Chevron decided to stay, but the country’s energy infrastructure also began to falter.

In this documentary, we trace Chevron’s long-term gamble in Venezuela, how it managed to survive nationalization, US sanctions and now open hostilities with the US military. Any attempt, however, to exploit the country’s resources won’t be fast or easy: analysts estimate it could cost upwards of $100 billion to lift Venezuela’s output back to peak 1970 levels.