Oil sits at the heart of Donald Trump’s Venezuelan gamble. Within a day of the US operation which ousted President Nicolas Maduro, Trump made his top priority clear: reviving the country’s oil industry.
“We’re going to have our very large US oil companies – the biggest anywhere in the world – go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken oil infrastructure and start making money for the country,” he said at a news conference on Saturday.
He has since said Venezuela will imminently hand over 30 to 50 million barrels of crude to the US government – worth around £2.1bn – and the US has seized two sanctioned tankers.
On top of that, he has said expanded American operations in Venezuela could be “up and running” in under 18 months.
Big promises. But how realistic are they?
Current state of affairs
In the short term, it is not clear where the 30 to 50 million barrels of oil would come from. America’s blockade on Venezuelan oil exports has put a chokehold on the country’s oil industry.
Data from Kpler, a global real-time data and analytics provider, suggests that there are currently about 40 million barrels of Venezuelan oil in storage. Around half of those are sitting on ships that either managed to pass through the blockade or are idling off Venezuela’s shores.
Sky News has mapped roughly 30 US-sanctioned vessels sitting near Venezuela’s coastline.
