What to Know About Venezuelan Energy Following Trumps Oil Deal

Venezuela has possibly the largest oil reserves in the world — though it hasn’t produced much in recent years.The Trump administration hopes to change that.President Trump announced on Friday that the United States had entered an agreement with Venezuela and a private oil company to “secure majority control” of 65 billion barrels of the country’s oil, or about a fifth of its reserves.The deal is highly unusual because the U.S.

government generally leaves oil exploration to private companies and does not take stakes in those businesses.It is also an ambitious project that is likely to take years to bear fruit given Venezuela’s dilapidated infrastructure, widespread corruption and unstable politics.Here’s what you need to know about Venezuelan oil.Venezuela has a lot of oil.Venezuela sits on more than 300 billion barrels of “proven oil reserves” — or oil that could be extracted at a profit — according to Oil & Gas Journal, which compiles data submitted by governments around the world.

By comparison, the United States, the world’s top oil producer, had 81 billion barrels of crude oil reserves last year, according to the journal.Many experts say the Venezuelan reserve figures are overly optimistic because they are based on unrealistic assumptions about how much oil could be profitably recovered....