A motorcycle passes by an oil-themed mural in Caracas, Venezuela, on May 9, 2022.
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Oil prices fell slightly on Sunday as the Trump administration’s overthrow of President Nicolas Maduro created severe uncertainty in oil-rich Venezuela.
usa crude oil It fell 31 cents, or 0.54%, to $57.01 per barrel. Global benchmark Brent It fell 22 cents, or 0.36%, to $60.53 per barrel.
President Donald Trump made clear Saturday that U.S. investments in Venezuela’s oil sector are a key objective of the regime change operation that ousted President Maduro.
“We’re going to get a very large American oil company, the largest in the world, to come in and spend billions of dollars to fix up our badly broken infrastructure, our oil infrastructure,” Trump said at a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago mansion in Palm Beach, Florida.
The president said Saturday that the U.S. embargo on Venezuelan oil continues.
Venezuela, a founding member of OPEC, has the world’s largest oil reserves at 303 billion barrels, accounting for about 17% of the world’s total, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
At its peak in the late 1990s, Caracas produced about 3.5 million barrels a day, according to energy consulting firm Kpler, but production has fallen significantly since then. The South American country currently produces about 800,000 barrels per day, according to Kpler data.
Chevron is the only US oil major with operations in Venezuela. According to Kpler, it was exporting approximately 140,000 barrels per day at the end of the fourth quarter of 2025.
Daan Struiven, head of oil research at Goldman Sachs, said the short-term impact of Maduro’s ouster on oil prices is unclear. In a note on Sunday, Stolbein told clients that production could increase slightly if a U.S.-backed government is established and the Trump administration lifts sanctions against Venezuela.
But Maduro’s ouster could also lead to supply disruptions in the short term, analysts said. In the long run, U.S. investments that increase Venezuela’s production will put downward pressure on oil prices, Strubiven said. However, he said any recovery in production is likely to be gradual and partial.
Helima Croft, head of global commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets, said oil company executives operating in Venezuela said it would cost $10 billion a year to rebuild production and that a stable security environment was essential to get production back to historic levels.
Croft told clients in a note on Saturday that an orderly transition of power could see sanctions completely lifted and production return by hundreds of thousands of barrels over 12 months.
“But in a chaotic regime change scenario, like what happened in Libya and Iraq, all bets are off,” she says.
