President Donald Trump announced during a meeting with executives of top oil companies that U.S. oil companies will invest $100 billion to rebuild Venezuela’s oil infrastructure.
Trump revealed details of the plan during his remarks at a roundtable with executives, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in the East Room.
“Our giant oil companies will be spending at least $100 billion of their money, not the government’s money,” he said.
“They don’t need government money, but they need government protection and need government security that when they spend all this money, it’s going to be there so they get their money back and make a very nice return,” he added.
Trump emphasized that the investment will go to rebuilding “the capacity and the infrastructure necessary.”
“Venezuela has also agreed that the United States will immediately begin refining and selling up to 50 million barrels of Venezuelan crude oil, which will continue indefinitely,” he noted.
Trump further added that U.S. companies built up Venezuela’s oil infrastructure, but previous presidents failed to take action after the assets were “stolen.”
“This president is much different than your other presidents,” he said, comparing himself to his predecessors. “They did nothing about it. They stole it. Some of the people in this room were a little bit younger when that happened, but not that much younger. It wasn’t that long ago.”
“So now we’re doing everything about it. Now we’re doing 500 percent about it, but it’s a long time after the act took place,” he added. “So they stole from us, and it was taken by socialists and communists at the time, and Venezuela was going bad, really bad. And as much oil as they have, they’re producing almost nothing,” he added.
Trump also noted that on Thursday, Venezuela gave the United States 30 billion barrels of oil, valued at about $4 billion.
Executives from Chevron, Exxon, Conoco Phillips, Continental, Halliburton, HKN, Valero, Marathon, Shell, Trafigura, Vitol Americas, Repsol, Eni, Aspect Holdings, Tallgrass, Raisa Energy, and Hilcorp were on hand for the round table.
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