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President Donald Trump wants Venezuela’s oil machine restarted with American help, but nobody on Wall Street or in Houston thinks this will be fast or cheap. According to Bloomberg, rebuilding the country’s oil system could cost over $100 billion and take at least a decade. And that’s if everything goes right, which it hasn’t in over twenty years. Francisco Monaldi, director of Latin American energy policy at Rice University’s Baker Institute, said it would take $10 billion per year for ten years just to get output back to where it was in the 1970s, when Venezuela pumped close to 4 million barrels a day. “A faster recovery would require even more investment,” Francisco said. Right now, production is stuck around 1 million barrels a day. The country is sitting on the world’s largest oil reserves and still can’t get things running. Breakdowns at ports and oil fields slow any chance of a comeback During the twelve years that Nicolás Maduro ruled, the country’s oil infrastructure fell apart. He was captured by U.S. forces early Saturday, but that doesn’t fix broken pipes. The system is in chaos. Ports are so slow that loading a single supertanker can now take five days, compared to just one day seven years ago. The Orinoco Basin, which holds close to half a trillion barrels of recoverable crude, is a graveyard of abandoned rigs.Equipment gets stripped in broad daylight and sold as spare parts. Nobody is checking the spills. Underground pipelines are falling apart and, in some cases, were stolen by the state oil company and sold as scrap metal. Fires and explosions destroyed key machinery. The Paraguana refinery complex, once the biggest in Latin America, barely works. It runs off and on and only at low rates. Its four oil upgraders, which are supposed to…

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Filed under: News - @ January 5, 2026 1:47 am