Chevron is nearing an agreement to fold all of its existing Venezuelan joint ventures into a sweeping new U.S.-Venezuela oil framework, positioning the American energy giant at the center of an arrangement President Trump has called “THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY” — a dramatic escalation from the smaller independent players who had, until now, been the only companies willing to move on new Venezuelan contracts.
Trump revealed the agreement Friday, August 28, saying the United States had secured majority control of more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuela’s proven oil reserves through a new private venture.
According to Venezuela’s government, the deal covers the development of 17 strategic oilfields plus eight additional greenfield blocks, with an initial production target of 1.5 million barrels per day — more than the country’s entire current output.
The agreement was negotiated by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Venezuela’s acting President Delcy Rodríguez. Under its terms, the U.S. secures 55% effective output of the new company, which would become the second-largest corporate holder of proven oil reserves in the world after Saudi Aramco.
The Terms
Rodríguez said in a televised address on Saturday that the arrangement will run for 25 years, though U.S. officials have separately cited 100-year development rights granted to the private venture involved — a discrepancy that remains unresolved, since full contract terms have not been published.
Under the deal, $19 from every barrel of oil produced and sold to the United States will flow to Caracas, an arrangement Rodríguez said could be worth as much as $209 billion to Venezuela over time, depending on oil prices. Rubio described the agreement as mutually beneficial, saying it would provide the U.S. with stable, lower-cost oil while bringing nearly $100 billion in private investment into Venezuela, supporting what he characterized as thousands of high-paying jobs and helping rebuild the country’s economy.
Rodríguez, for her part, insisted Venezuela retains full “ownership” and “sovereignty” over its resources despite the majority-control terms.
Chevron Comes In
According to people close to the negotiations, Chevron is close to finalizing a separate agreement that would move all of its existing Venezuelan joint ventures into the country’s new energy framework, granting the company significantly greater operational control and opening the door to expand several of its key fields.
The agreement, expected to be formally announced imminently, builds on a previously disclosed asset swap allowing Chevron’s Petropiar heavy crude project — its largest operation in Venezuela — to expand into the neighboring Ayacucho 8 block.
A second expansion is under negotiation for a smaller Chevron project elsewhere within the Orinoco Belt. Chevron currently produces roughly 260,000 barrels per day in Venezuela, a substantial share of the country’s total output of approximately 1.25 million barrels per day.
Legals
None of this would be possible without Venezuela’s own legislative changes earlier this year. In February, Venezuela’s National Assembly approved a comprehensive reform of the country’s Organic Law on Hydrocarbons, overhauling the sector specifically to grant foreign companies far greater operational control than prior law allowed.
Rodríguez has continued building on that reform throughout 2026, including through an April signing with Chevron that laid the groundwork for the current asset-swap negotiations now nearing completion.
A Shift From the “Majors on the Sidelines” Pattern
Chevron’s apparent move marks a significant departure from the pattern that had defined Venezuela’s oil sector reopening through much of this year. Earlier contracts — including deals with Hunt Oil and oilfield services firm SLB — were signed by smaller, independent companies willing to commit capital before roughly $170 billion in unresolved legacy creditor claims and expropriation arbitration awards against Venezuela were settled.
Larger players, including ExxonMobil, had explicitly called Venezuela “uninvestable” until that legal architecture was resolved. Chevron’s willingness to expand its existing Venezuelan footprint under this new framework suggests the company’s calculus has shifted, though it remains unclear from current reporting whether the underlying legacy-claims issue has actually been resolved, or whether Chevron is instead proceeding under a structure designed to work around it.
Venezuela holds roughly 303 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, the largest national total in the world, but has produced only a fraction of its historical peak output of 3.5 million barrels per day in the 1970s due to years of underinvestment, sanctions, and mismanagement.
Future Production
The 65 billion barrels covered by this agreement represent more than one-fifth of that total reserve base. Trump has suggested the deal could eventually help lower U.S. gasoline prices, though analysts have cautioned that pump prices depend on global crude markets, refinery margins, and domestic supply conditions largely independent of any single agreement, and that materially increasing Venezuelan production at this scale would likely take years regardless of the framework now in place.
Chevron’s agreement is expected to be formalized in the near term, and its structure — along with whether other major international oil companies follow with similar moves — will likely determine how quickly Venezuela can approach the production levels this new framework anticipates.
With full contract terms still unpublished and the relationship between the 25-year and 100-year timelines cited by each government still unclear, further detail is likely to emerge as Chevron’s specific agreement is finalized and disclosed.
