Prices for US-managed sales of Venezuelan crude are already about one-third higher than they were under sanctioned Venezuelan control, US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said Jan. 15, as the US official laid out the Trump administration's case for its ongoing oversight of the Venezuelan oil industry.
"We are getting about a 30% higher realized price when we sell the same barrel of oil than they sold the same barrel of oil for three weeks ago," Wright said. "And a quarter or third of (that money) leaked out in corruption and was never going back to the government."
On Jan. 14, a Trump administration official confirmed to Platts, part of S&P Global Energy, that the US had completed its first sale of Venezuelan oil, valued at $500 million. Since the US' apprehension of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on Jan. 3, Wright and the Department of Energy have been placed in charge of marketing 30 to 50 million barrels of Venezuelan crude and have said that they will control the revenues and distribute them back to Venezuela's government.
Market participants first heard February orders of Merey-16 crude on Jan. 13, while traders Trafigura and Vitol had been heard Jan. 15 booking fixtures outbound from the US Gulf Coast to Venezuela.
"We have significant power right now, or influence, over Venezuela," Wright said. "We are controlling the sale of all of their oil and natural gas, and then we are taking those funds and placing them in American-controlled accounts and flowing them back to Venezuela."
No timeframe for elections
Speaking at the US Energy Association's State of Energy Industry Forum in Washington, D.C., Wright said the current Trump administration policy was designed to avoid the chaos that could result from a sudden regime change. Since Maduro's ouster, former Vice President Delcy Rodriguez has been sworn in as the Interim President, while other influential figures in Maduro's government have remained in power.
Trump has repeatedly praised Rodriguez for her willingness to work with the US, including on crude sales. On Jan. 15, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Rodriguez and fellow interim government members had been "extremely cooperative" and "thus far met all of the demands and requests of the United States and of the President."
"The president likes what he's seeing and will expect that cooperation to continue," Leavitt said.
Trump met with Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who was barred from running in Venezuela's 2024 presidential election and was later awarded the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to advance democracy in the country. Her successor on the opposition ticket, Edmundo Gonzalez, was widely regarded as having won the election by international observers, but Maduro claimed victory and remained in power.
Wright said the administration was wary of creating a power vacuum and referenced the chaos following the US's defeat of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
"In the short term, we saw in Iraq, if you disempower, de-Baathification, everybody that was in power, everybody that has the guns, and everybody that knows how to run the levers of the civil service in the government, that doesn't go well," Wright said. "So we are dealing with the people with the guns today. This is not a democratically elected government of the Venezuelan people."
Leavitt told reporters Trump was "committed to hopefully seeing elections in Venezuela one day," but did not provide a timetable. Wright said the US's short-term goal was to "keep the nation together" and to improve economic conditions "as quickly as possible."
US oil producers, whom Trump has urged to invest $100 billion in rebuilding Venezuela's oil infrastructure and boosting production in the country, have made diverging promises on their willingness to enter the country barring significant reforms. On Jan. 13, American Petroleum Institute CEO Mike Sommers said his members were seeking specific assurances of physical and legal security before committing to new projects, amid what Rapidan Energy CEO Bob McNally described as an "expectations gap" between Trump and industry.
"We have to have policy changes, rule of law, contract sanctity, those things have to change," Sommers said. "We need capitalism to flourish in Venezuela."
Wright said the administration shares those goals, including a "pathway" to an eventual democratically elected government, but did not discuss how quickly they could be achieved or whether large US producers would begin project development in the interim.
"We want to see the return of law and order," he said. "We're going to see, hopefully, significant growth in the economy, and then conditions so American businesses and others will go back into the country and invest."
"A peaceful, market-based US ally, a star member of our hemisphere -- that's the vision," he said.
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