Venezuela is no longer the land of black gold.

LondonHe Washington's coup against the Nicolás Maduro regime has been forceful. But it is not the first time that US planes and helicopters have operated over Venezuelan airspace. In June 1958, in a country parched by extreme drought, "a convoy of planes loaded with drums [drums] water"Intended to help the population of Caracas. Gabriel García Márquez explained it, Gabo, in "Caracas without water", published in Journalistic workVolume 4, page 609.

Seven decades after that episode, the nature of the White House intervention, in light of the new US security strategyIt couldn't be more different. There was no humanitarian emergency, or not like the one back then, nor—despite the official narrative—a fight against drug trafficking. Even less credible is there a short-term prospect of democratization for Venezuelans. Is the reason oil? Yes, but not exclusively. There are other factors at play: for example, driving China out of Washington's backyard.

"The US doesn't need Venezuelan oil; they're already the kings of the world. They're the biggest producers and exporters," says Mar Reguant, an energy researcher at ICREA-CSIC and a professor at Northwestern University in Illinois. According to theEnergy Information AdministrationIn September 2025, the United States produced 13.8 million barrels per day, well above the 9 million from Saudi Arabia, OPEC's top producer, the organization of producing countries, which Venezuela co-founded in 1960. A glance at the country's production figures reveals the true state of a declining industry: just over 920,000 barrels per day in 2024. In the 1990s, production exceeded three million.

The excuse of Venezuelan oil is not, therefore, the issue. "It's more about geopolitics. Cuba won't even have enough to eat," says Reguant. Among other reasons, because what the Caribbean country contributes to the global market doesn't even represent 1% of total extraction and, in business terms, is negligible. Martijn Vlaskamp also said so a few days ago in that same newspaper. Professor Ramón y Cajal at the Barcelona Institute for International Studies (IBEI), a researcher in natural resource policy, wrote thatdespite having enormous potentialVenezuela is currently a minor player in the global market, with significant infrastructure problems."

Pauline Heinrichs, from King's College London, a specialist in climate and energy warfare studies, emphasizes: "The economic arguments for fossil fuels are weak in the context of Venezuela." She stated this during a briefing organized this week by Global Strategic Communications Council (GSCC). Further proof is that Maduro's removal from Miraflores Palace has not altered crude oil prices. The markets have calmly absorbed the blow, as analyst Julian Popov, former Bulgarian Minister of the Environment, also noted during the same GSCC session: "After the attack on Venezuela, there has been hardly any reaction from the oil market, nor do I expect it to have any significant effect."

And yet, Donald Trump has insisted throughout the week, in interviews and statements of all kinds, that with control over Venezuela's crude oil, and the promise of forced delivery under threat of between 30 and 50 million barrelsPrices will fall. He also stated that he will make Venezuelan oil wells profitable again: "Our major companies, the largest in the world, will invest billions of dollars, repair damaged infrastructure, and start generating money for the country." He conveyed the same idea almost point-blank.This Friday night, the big oil companies will be in the spotlight.He has summoned them to the White House to practically demand investments of up to $100 billion to revive the country's industry. For now, it seems more like a demand made with a gun to the table than a plan with layoffs and furloughs that would excite everyone.

The curse of abundance… and of numbers

The president's diagnosis, and his expectations, don't seem very realistic. At least not for the moment. To paraphrase Gabo, it could be said that since the industrial exploitation of black gold began in Venezuela in 1914, the country has been shaped by such sudden wealth that it has ended up replacing development with the illusion of abundance. And in that illusory abundance lies, in part, its misfortune.

Officially, according to OPEC data, Caracas has 303 billion barrels in reserves. This would represent a figure close to 17% of the world total, ahead even of Saudi Arabia, which has 263 billion barrels. This crude oil existing beneath Venezuela's subsoil is equivalent to 41 and a half years of US consumption at the current rate: about 20 million barrels per day. With this dataAccording to official figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Trump's announcement that prices would fall with the delivery of 30 to 50 million barrels per day is irrelevant. "It's his usual populism," says Reguant. Because, in practice, that amount wouldn't even last three days, assuming consumption remained stable at the aforementioned 20 million barrels.

But the concept of oil reserves "is not stable," explains Professor Adi Imsirovic, an energy systems expert at Oxford University. The OECD rigorously distinguishes between proven, probable, possible, and contingent reserves. Proven reserves are not a constant: they represent the oil that can be extracted economically with existing technology and current prices. OPEC consolidated Venezuela's figure in 2008, when the price per barrel was approaching $140. The crude that is extracted is sold at a discount of about $25 compared to Brent crude, which is around $35 per barrel. Some recent reports from Bloomberg even indicated that Caracas sent crude to Beijing at a price of $14 per barrel. All of this implies that, with current extraction and refining costs, partly due to the poor state of the infrastructure, and the investment that would be needed to recover previous production levels, truly profitable reserves could fall below 100 billion barrels, "less than a third of the total also cited."

The Viceroy's Dream

To this must be added the nature of the crude oil. Venezuelan oil is extremely heavy, rich in sulfur, and expensive to produce. It must be diluted with naphtha or diesel and its sulfur removed with hydrogen, a costly process that only highly sophisticated refineries can undertake, primarily on the US Gulf Coast—Texas and Louisiana—and in some newer plants in India, China, and the Middle East. It is no coincidence that it is sold at steep discounts.

To this context, we must add another factor that would explain Trump's policy: the oil of Guyana and Suriname, currently much more profitable than Venezuelan oil. In fact, Trump has sought not only to reshape the political landscape in Caracas, but also to secure US energy hegemony in the new oil epicenter of the Caribbean and the South Atlantic, which has shifted from Venezuela to these two territories. As a side effect, he wants to distance China from the hemisphere, where it has made significant investments in recent years, especially in Peru, where President Xi Jinping inaugurated the new port of Chancay at the end of 2014, at a cost of $1.3 billion, to decongest the port of Callao and create a hub for trade between Latin America and Asia.

Unlike Venezuelan crude, Guyanese crude is light and cheap to extract. The discoveries reported on the Stabroek blog have transformed a country of fewer than a million inhabitants into an emerging power, although it is true that Its population has benefited very littleGuyana already produces more than 600,000 barrels per day and could exceed one million before the end of the decade. Suriname is following the same path, with promising results in its offshore basin. The new map would explain why Venezuela has ceased to be indispensable and why Washington can afford a more aggressive policy: the oil critical to US interests is no longer under the Orinoco River, but off the coasts of Georgetown and Paramaribo. Finally, the expansionist ambition that Maduro has displayed throughout his presidency in the region around the Essequibo River (Guyana), where it is estimated there are up to 25 billion barrels, perhaps helps explain the true reason for Trump's coup. It must be kept in mind that without Caracas's oil, Venezuela would be in dire straits. Havana, heir to the Castro revolution, may have its days numbered.And Marco Rubio would enter the island where his parents were born as the new viceroy of the pearl of the Antilles.