The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - The Venezuela Oil Deal Is Just the Start || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: September 25, 2026

The recent series of U.S.-Venezuela oil deals is not quite as significant as it was made out to be. Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihan Full Newsletter: https://bit.ly/4hfb6PL

everybody, Peter Zine here coming from Colorado. Today we're going to look at something that happened while I was away at Yosemite, the oil deals between the United States and Venezuela. There's been a lot of hyperbolic conversation about them. The reality is much more muted. We've got three things. First of all, Chevron, which is an American company that never left. Venezuela has announced a series of investments with the aim of increasing output by 300,000 barrels over the next years. This is probably at the upper level of what Chevron can do. Not that Chevron's not capable, but that the crude in Venezuela, as a rule, is very difficult to work with. You basically have three regions, one in the east that has some more conventional crude, one in the west around Maracaibo

that's heavy crude, and then down in the south in a place called the Orinoco Belt, where it's super heavy crude and is actually a physical solid at room temperature, and it has to be heated up and mixed with other liquids in order to be able to put into a pipeline. Anyway, Chevron has operations throughout the area. They're basically taking the fields that they already have, putting in some more money and trying to increase recovery rates. They're really not doing anything new. So $300,000, that's about all you're going to get.

The second one is America's Hunt Oil, which is taking over two small fields in the east of the country that are small. And if they do really well, you know, maybe they'll get $100,000 barrels out of that over 10 years. Again, not very interesting. Remember, this is a country that at the height, was producing four million barrels a day back in the 1980s and 1990s. And then under Chavez and Maduro, until it fell into under a million barrels a day where it is now.

The third one, the third deal is the one that's getting really interesting. It's with a company called NABEP. NABEP is the successor that has been renamed a few times for a firm that started operating back in the 2010s. At the time was called Petro Zamora, run by a guy by the name, of Alejandro Betancourt Lopez. This guy is somebody who was tightly affiliated with the Russian

government. And when the United States put sanctions on the Chavez Maduro regime, the Russians basically came in to do what they could, but Russian technology sucks in the type of fields that Venezuela has. So Betancourt

was able to basically bring in a few people from outside the Russian sphere and actually operate a few fields. But then when you get to 2020, if you remember back to 2020, you know, COVID year, it was kind of rough in Venezuela as well because they had elections and it looked for a hot minute like this guy from the outside was going to take over. He never did. But Betancourt sided with him. And it came to light that he had also been embezzling a lot of money from the Venezuelan state oil company. And so he got kicked out of the country and Petros Zamora just

until it was only producing like 100,000, maybe even 50,000 barrels a day. Well, fast forward to calendar year 2023, and a woman by the name of Rodriguez, who is now the acting president of Venezuela, brought him back in because the oil sector in Venezuela had just tanked in the intervening three years and started bringing the company back. I think it produces about 200,000 barrels a day right now. Anyway, this new deal with the United States is with the successor to Petrosamora, with Betancourt personally, they've renamed the company N-A-B-E-P. And they're basically taking all of the Russian concessions and all of the Chinese concessions and giving them to this new company.

Now, this new company does not have the staffing, much less the expertise and the volume and the drilling rings that are necessary to operate all these fields. You'd probably need about 90 rigs to really make it all work. They've got two. In addition, the United States has taken a theoretical, not actual, theoretical sharing and NABEP and has theoretically the ability to assign people to their board. And theoretically, if the U.S. Defense Department specifically wants to take the crude that NABEP produces, it gets rights of first refusal. The first 20 percent, they get at a huge discount, basically production costs. The other 80 percent they can get at market costs.

But all of this is in theory, unless and until someone else comes in and provides the funding and the staffing and the equipment, NABEP really isn't going to go anywhere. The point of this deal, however, is for the U.S. government to put a stamp of approval on this one firm so that others who are willing to take more risk can come in, invest in the firm, and then maybe turn it into something that can turn Venezuela's oil fortunes around. It's a necessary first step. I don't begrudge the U.S. administration or the acting Venezuelan government for that. But there's no money here.

There's no skill transfer here. There's no equipment coming in at yet. The Chevron deal really is at the moment the only one that matters at all, and that's 300,000 barrels over five years. Not a big deal. But if, if, if, if, if all of those things happen, then you are talking about the very, very beginning of a Renaissance in Venezuela. You still have to change the laws because right now foreign ownership is a issue.

You still have to change the reparations route, because right now it's not clear how the money gets to the investors. But at the very minimum, we now have at least one entity operating in Venezuela that actually has the right to develop fields that isn't the state. That is a step in the right direction. But let's not get too crazy. Let's not get ahead of ourselves.