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Pentagon office to take equity stake
September 1, 2026
The White House says Venezuelan interim authorities granted North American Blue Energy Partners 100-year concessions for 17 oil fields, with the Pentagon taking an equity stake.
CNBC reports that Venezuelan interim authorities have granted U.S.-backed North American Blue Energy Partners, or NABEP, 100-year concessions for 17 oil fields holding proven reserves of about 65 billion barrels, an announcement the White House made on Monday. CNN reports that the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Capital will acquire up to a 35% equity stake in a company that owns NABEP, the second-largest private oil producer in Venezuela, and that the State Department gains the right to buy 20% of the oil NABEP produces at the cost of production. The Trump administration puts its share of the new joint venture at 55%, according to CNN. CNBC reports that the company is expected to pay $200 billion in royalty and tax payments to Venezuelan governments over the first 25 years. Axios carries the account under the same framing of the deal's hidden history, the New York Times ties the Pentagon's role to a move into the Venezuelan oil business, and the Washington Post examines whether the deal will lower gas prices as Trump said it would.
The accounts split on one figure: the size of Venezuela's proven oil reserves. One account puts the national total at 303 billion barrels and calls it the largest in the world; another account does not carry that total, holding instead to the reserves attached to the 17 fields in the concession. Nothing in the record explains the gap, and the two numbers measure different things, one a country, one a set of fields.
The practical questions are reported rather than contested. CNN reports that the Energy Department concluded in a 2016 long-term strategic review of the reserve that the cost of hardening storage for heavy oil would outweigh the benefits, that Venezuela's output sits at a fraction of capacity, and that Andy Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates, described a workaround for getting Venezuelan oil into the reserve. Researchers at Clearview Energy Partners suggested selling the Venezuelan crude on the open market and buying light crude from the Permian or elsewhere in the United States, CNN reports. Trump said in the Oval Office on Monday that the partnership would not produce enough oil to lower gas prices before November's midterm elections. The terms of the concession, the equity stake, the purchase right and the payment schedule are settled across the coverage; the reserves figure is not.
Still developing
The record does not close on the size of Venezuela's proven reserves, where the figures do not line up between the accounts.