A single figure sets Venezuela apart from the rest of the world: 303 billion barrels of so-called proven oil reserves. But experts say the country’s estimate is inherently problematic and far from proven—rooted in exaggerated, aging data from a corrupt government.
The number has long been touted by politicians and investors as an important measure of untapped energy potential, most recently by the Trump’s administration in detailing a sweeping deal for the U.S. to take control of some Venezuelan reserves.
But a more realistic estimate of the country’s proven reserves—a gold standard metric, representing the amount of oil that can reasonably be extracted under current conditions—is about one-third of what it has reported, half a dozen experts tell The Associated Press. They put the likely figure at 60 to 120 billion barrels, a vast amount but not enough for Venezuela to remain the world’s largest holder of reserves.
The distinction is an important one as Venezuela and the U.S. attempt to attract new investment into the country’s dilapidated oil industry, and it suggests that the deal Trump announced in August claiming the U.S. would ultimately control more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuela’s proven oil reserves is much less profitable than he asserted.
“That’s a funny, funny proposal,” Evanan Romero, a former Venezuela energy official now based in Houston, says of the deal, adding that he believes the Trump administration didn’t fully research the South American country’s claims before wading in. “If the U.S. government called them and asked them to testify to how they did the procedure—well, the whole world will know that that’s a funny number, an absolute lie.”
Trump has said that under the deal, the U.S. will control 65 billion barrels of proven reserves—a figure exceeding the entirety of U.S. crude reserves. He’s repeatedly cited the 65 billion barrels number and called the oil deal the biggest in history, a way to refill U.S. strategic reserves and lower gas prices that have surged during the Iran war.
But experts say the U.S. is gaining access to a mix of sites that are nearly depleted or totally undeveloped, with an expected output a fraction of what Trump claims. Some of the oil fields are deep within the Orinoco Belt, a virtual wilderness in central-eastern Venezuela posing major technical challenges.
