The South American country has the largest black gold reserves in the world. Reopening its market to UK and US prospectors raises huge environmental questions.
Since US forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro Moros on Saturday 3rd January 2026, global headlines have been focused on the political and economic future of the embattled state. Not least the estimated 300 billion barrels of crude oil believed to be sitting within its borders.
Messaging from The White House has been jarringly clear – there will be no vote to usher in a new democratically elected government in Caracas until the country is deemed to have ‘healed’ following decades of dictatorship. In the meantime, the US will ‘run things’, and among the priorities is opening access to oil reserves for companies favoured under the America First policy.
Firms in the States aren’t the only ones eyeing up the spoils, of course. Lord Browne, the former boss of BP, has already spoken out about the need for UK companies to act quickly so as not to miss out on what The Telegraph has hailed as an impending Venezuelan gold rush. Meanwhile, British hedge funds are also circling and preparing to pile in.
In climate terms, the impact of this is set to be significant. On the one hand, as the New York Times reported this week, under Maduro Venezuela has been producing less than 1 million barrels of crude oil per day, down from 3.5 million every 24 hours in the 1970s and 1980s. But, despite the relatively low output over the past 30 years, the country is one of the largest contributors to methane emissions on the planet.
This is largely driven by flaring – a process of releasing the powerful greenhouse gas, alongside carbon dioxide, from oil refineries. A cheaper, simpler but more environmentally damaging solution compared with capturing, storing and utilising emissions, corruption, mismanagement and poorly maintained infrastructure have all led to a sharp rise in flaring since the millennium. A 2023 Global Gas Flaring Tracker Report suggested more than 40% of Venezuelan gas was released in this way.
There is therefore some logic to arguments that opening up the oil market to global giants with the capital to invest and upgrade facilities could bring down harmful waste streams. Especially methane, which can trap up to 80 times more heat in our atmosphere compared with carbon dioxide and is responsible for most global warming to date.
It’s also true that between 2010 and 2016, the state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela reported more than 46,000 oil spills, some of which polluted water supplies, devastated marine life and poisoned soil. Elsewhere, illegal gold mining and drilling has seen Venezuela succumb to widespread unauthorised deforestation and contaminated rivers.
However, the theory that Venezuela’s poor environmental track record could improve by increasing international access to its oil fields to ‘clean’ them up quickly falls apart when we consider the nature of those reserves. US President Donald Trump has labelled the country’s crude as ‘probably the dirtiest in the world’, and he’s not the only one.
Clayton Seigle, a Senior Fellow in the energy and geopolitics program at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, agrees, explaining to the New York Times that most of the South American nation’s oil supply is considered ‘extra-heavy’, requires advanced extraction technologies, and leads to significantly higher emissions from both production and use.
Environmental criticism is also right to raise alarms about a nationalised oil industry being restructured and redesigned at the behest of a Trump administration which has systematically defunded climate research and action. Worse still, it has actively moved to erase references and evidence of how urgent the ecological crisis has become. All of which is before we mention the illegality of a military operation solely aimed at removing a foreign leader in a bid to extract economic profits from a country which had largely closed to the West, and can ill-afford to hand over any of its resources.
Image: alejandro hernandez / Unsplash
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