Welcome back to One Thing, I'm David Rind, and President Donald Trump wants to bring oil production back to Venezuela. But would any of those profits make their way into American pockets? The benefits of that.

Will be in the future where we will be talking about, you know, a positive effect for the US economy in 2030. Stick around.

Okay, thank you very much. This is big stuff.

President Trump's news conference on Saturday, where he detailed the brazen U.S. Abduction of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, lasted for an hour and one minute. He covered a lot of ground.

'The illegitimate dictator Maduro was the kingpin of a vast criminal network response But it no-

But at no point during that hour did Trump or his top officials mention the word democracy. Not one time. Even though Maduro has been credibly accused of rigging an election, jailing opposition voices, using force against protesters, spreading democracy did not seem to be at the core of this mission. A word that Trump did use a lot, though, over and over again, in fact, was oil.

We're in the oil business. You know, they stole our oil. As everyone knows, the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust. We're going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure.

He said now with Maduro out, U.S. Oil companies could come in, fix things up, and people in the U. S. And Venezuela will reap the benefits.

We're gonna take back the oil that, frankly, we should have taken back a long time ago. A lot of money is coming out of the ground. We're going to get reimbursed for all of that.

The Energy Department says it will meet with oil executives this week to try and convince them to return to Venezuela. But after years of deep financial losses, will any of these companies actually want to come back? Is it even possible given the uncertainty on the ground in Venezuela right now? And if they do, how long is it going to take for everyday Americans to feel any impact? Let's unpack all this today with Francisco Manaldi. He's the director of the Latin America Energy Program at the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University. He's an expert on all things Venezuelan oil. So Francisco, could we just first step back a bit? Just how much oil is Venezuela sitting on?

Well, you know, that's a very interesting question because the resources are massive. Just to give you a sense, Venezuela has more than a trillion barrels of oil in place, but that doesn't mean that those are either technically recoverable or economically recoverable. And so the official figure of Venezuela's reserves is 300 billion. But that uses a very high recovery rate compared to the one that actually has been achieved in reality. And that recovery rate that they use requires much higher oil prices. So even though the official figure is about 300 billion, a more conservative estimate will be around 100 billion, still will not be the highest oil reserves in the world, but it would be among the top five. Bottom line, massive resource potential, but highly concentrated on extra heavy oil, which is a thick, dense oil that is costly to transport and to process and has a high carbon intensity.

Right, so it has a ton of oil, you know, in place, but they haven't been making money off of it, right? Why is that?

So Venezuela at its peak was a very important oil producer, had a very large share of the exports in the world in the 1960s until the very early 70s. Then it really, really declined. And then it started to come back in the 1990s at reach a peak of 3.4 million files before Google Chiles came to power. And since then, the oil industry has been in severe decline.

Venezuelan oil workers giving us a rare look inside their crumbling industry.

Populism finished all of this, he says. Do you see this? Nothing works anymore. The government finished us completely.

For a variety of reasons, but the main one is that Hugo Chávez, in order to control politically the national oil company, basically destroyed it.

Critics say Chávez repeatedly used Pedevesa as a political piggy bank. They say billions in oil profits that could have been used to modernize oil infrastructure and increase production were instead used to pay for expensive social programs that often benefited Chávez supporters, largely the poor.

He fired, you know, half of the employees, but among them, most of the executives and the technical personnel, you know, to give you an idea, 95% of the PhDs in the company were fired. Wow.

It's outrageous, outrageous. Look at us, he says. We don't have money for medication, for food. Soon we'll have to bring our dead colleagues to this protest.

But the other element is expropriation. Basically, two of the three largest investors in the Venezuelan oil sector, which were Conoco and Exxon. American companies. Correct. These two companies did not accept the forceful renegotiation of contracts that Hugo Chavez did. And they left. Chevron stayed, Total from France stayed, but two of the largest investors left.

We built Venezuela oil industry with American talent, drive, and skill. And the socialist regime stole it from us during those previous administrations, and they stole it through force. This constituted one of the largest thefts of American property in the history of our country.

So when President Trump says that Venezuela has stolen oil from the U.S., is that accurate? Well,

It's not clear what he exactly refers to, but some people say that it's about the nationalization in 1975. The two largest players at the time were Exxon and Shell that produced most of Venezuela's oil, but also Gold and Chevron and others. And what happened was that concessions were going to expire in 1983, and Venezuela nationalized them a few years ahead in 1975, but they were compensated. So I think you can hardly say. That contracts that were going to expire in eight years and were compensated constitute any type of theft. However, you could argue that Conoco and Exxon were expropriated and even though they got an award from international arbitration, they were only paid... Exxons has a much smaller award and they were paid part of it, but Conoco is owed more than 10 billion dollars even today and that expropriation occurred in 2007. So, imagine we are almost 20 years later and they haven't been paid. However, what this means is that they are owed money. They are owed, you know, $10 billion.

It wasn't their oil. Right, so they want their money back for being kicked out of the country and the losses they suffered there, but the oil that they were dealing with wasn't really theirs to begin with. Exactly.

I mean, Venezuelan legislation, like every other country except for the U.S., says that the state is the owner of the oil resource. They can only give contracts that give you a time lapse for you to extract and then pay taxes and royalties. And so, arguing that the oil was owned by U.S. Companies.

Is, I think, inaccurate. So President Trump, as part of this move to take out Maduro, he says that this paves the way for U.S. Companies to come back into Venezuela, fix up the oil infrastructure and start taking the soil out of the ground and, by extension, take out the money and have that flow to the U. S. And the Venezuelans. How would that actually work? Is that feasible at this point?

'Well, I think there are tons of preconditions before, you know, oil companies will be willing to sink billions of dollars in Venezuela, a country where contracts have been reneged multiple times. And those include, in my view, first, the perception that the relationships between Venezuela and the U.S. Will stay positive because, you will not invest if there's going to be sanctions again. Second, you know, a clear... Framework, institutional, contractual, fiscal regime that makes you do a long-term bet because we're talking about projects that have maturity of decades. So my sense is that the only company that is going to be willing to invest some money in Venezuela if they are given a license by the U.S. As they have today is Chevron because they are already there. Exactly. And they produce 25% of Venezuela's oil. They have a cash flow. They don't have to risk any additional capital. But imagine for a company like Conoco or Exxon or any other, they would have to invest billions of dollars and then sanctions are a very big deal for these companies. And so since the US cannot promise, I mean, the Trump administration cannot promise that a future... Administration in the U.S. Might reimpose sanctions, that very fact that you are not sure about the stability in the relation between these two countries could be a tremendous deterrent.

So these companies are looking even beyond Trump. They want to know that administrations down the line are going to support what they're doing there. And there's just no guarantee of that at all. To give you an idea.

Put an example. If Conoco decides to invest in Venezuela, the most likely scenario is that their investment will not happen within the Trump administration. It will take three years for them to start, and that means that what happens after Trump is much more important than the current situation for them, to evaluate a project. So these companies... Are very systematic and careful in evaluating this risk. This is part of their business. They do it everywhere. And I think they will be, the ones who have to put fresh capital will be extremely cautious in putting significant amount of money, unless we're talking about very short cycle, short term investments that can make a buck. But that's not the type of business that a company like Conoco does. Other, maybe smaller players. Might be willing to do that.

When we come back, why the rest of the world will be watching, no matter what these companies decide. Stick around. Is the fact that the president says that the U.S. Is running Venezuela, whatever that might mean, is that enough stability for these companies to say, hey, you know, we have the U S president kind of overseeing this, and that's enough for us to be able to go in there and operate somewhat comfortably.

I think not at this point. I mean, it's very much unclear until the dust settles. What is exactly going to happen in terms of who is going to be ruling Venezuela, how stable that is, what are the rules of the game, as I mentioned? What contracts are we talking about? Are these contracts going to pass by a Venezuelan legislature? That legislature is not legitimate because no one, including the US, has recognized those elections. So that creates a lot of uncertainty for oil companies.

I mean, let's say for a minute that there was some kind of stability and these companies were willing to go in to some extent and operate, how long would it take for the benefits to reach the American economy or Americans in general, do you think?

Yeah, well, there is one benefit that could happen relatively quickly, which is refiners in the U.S. Gulf Coast, like Venezuelan oil, because these refineries were optimized for heavy oil. And it turns out that the two main providers, Mexico and Venezuela, have both been declining in their exports to the United States for a long time. And the other alternative, which is Canada, since the famous Keystone XL pipeline was never built. That oil cannot get in a significant amount to the Gulf Coast. So in that sense, if you reroute the exports that were going to the black market into the U.S. Gulf Coast, that will be a benefit for U. S. Refiners. They will have better margins in their refining and they could translate probably some of that in lower prices of refined products. But I don't think that's going to be a massive benefit at all in terms of lower prices, it will be a modest decline because in the end, the price of oil is set in the global market and, you know, Venezuela is a minor producer. It produces less than 1% of global oil production. In the longer term, you know, this could be really game changing for the world and just for the U S in the sense Peace out. Higher supply from Venezuela would avoid a significant increase in the price of oil in the next day.

Or so. What about other countries that have natural resources like oil or geopolitical value? You know we've seen Katie Miller who is married to the top White House aide Stephen Miller post a picture on social media of Greenland covered by an American flag. The caption was soon and just you know before we recorded this leaders from key NATO countries had to put out a joint statement stressing that Greenland belongs to its people and and only Greenland and Denmark should have a say in its future. Trump has also threatened Mexico, Iran, and Colombia in recent days. So I guess I'm wondering, should other countries or just even energy or mineral industries be worried about being caught up in this way that Trump is kind of going about things geopolitically?

Yeah, that's an interesting question. Of course, Greenland, as far as I know, doesn't have oil, but it's more about minerals and it's about, you know, the strategic place. And so there seems to be different motivations, but bottom line, the fact that the US is willing to sort of threaten the control of natural resources in a way that had not happened since sort of colonial times. It could be potentially a game changer in that other major powers might want to do the same thing.

Finally, I think the average listener might be hearing about all this oil and geopolitical drama and they're like, I just want to know if it's going to cost me more to fill up my gas tank, you know? And there's also a long history of taxpayers subsidizing the oil production industry. So how likely is that to happen if Trump gets what he wants here in Venezuela?

Well, as I mentioned, I do think that in the short term, but it's not because Venezuela would produce more. It would be because US sanctions are lifted or the consumers could benefit from the Venezuelan oil flowing back to the US refineries. However, this is a time in which the price of oil is going down. In fact, if there were no sanctions to Venezuela, Iran, and Russia, there will be a massive plot in the oil market and the prices will be collapsing today because supply is higher than demand. However, that will eventually flip because what we're seeing is that the oil industry is not investing enough for the kind of demand growth that we are seeing. And so that surplus that we have in 2026, perhaps a little bit in 2027, will very likely turn. And that's when I think, as I mentioned, that Venezuela's production could be really important for the world oil market. So. Paradoxically, if Trump is successful in getting higher production in Venezuela, the benefits of that will be in the future. We will be talking about a positive effect for the U.S. Economy in 2030.

'2030. That's an important reality check. And again, that's if these companies are actually willing to go and make the investment in a place where they have, you know, had very bad experiences in recent history. Well, Francisco Manoli, thanks so much. I really appreciate it. As we record this, it remains unclear if American oil companies share Trump's vision of operating inside Venezuela. One well-placed industry source told my colleague Matt Egan on Monday that the appetite for jumping into Venezuela is low since they don't know what the government will look like. Quote, the president's desire is different than the industry's, and the White House would have known that if they had communicated with the industry prior to the operation on Saturday. President Trump, meanwhile, said on Sunday that he did communicate with the oil companies before and after the mission to capture Maduro, a courtesy he did not extend to congressional leaders.

And they want to go in, and they're going to do a great job for the people of Venezuela. And they're gonna represent us well.

That's all for us today. We are back here on Sunday. I'll talk to you then.