‘Everybody loses’ if production supercharged in country with largest known oil reserves, critics say
Donald Trump, by dramatically seizing Nicolás Maduro and claiming dominion over Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, has taken his “drill, baby, drill” mantra global. Achieving the president’s dream of supercharging the country’s oil production would be financially challenging – and if fulfilled, would be “terrible for the climate”, experts say.
Trump has aggressively sought to boost oil and gas production within the US. Now, following the capture and arrest of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, he is seeking to orchestrate a ramp-up of drilling in Venezuela, which has the largest known reserves of oil in the world – equivalent to some 300bn barrels, according to research firm the Energy Institute.
“The oil companies are going to go in, they are going to spend money, we are going to take back the oil, frankly, we should’ve taken back a long time ago,” the US president said in the wake of Maduro’s extraction from Caracas. “A lot of money is coming out of the ground, we are going to be reimbursed for everything we spend.”
US oil companies will “spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure … and start making money for the country”, Trump added, with his administration pressing Venezuela’s interim government to delete a law requiring oil projects to be half-owned by the state.
