Donald Trump has ordered a “total and complete” blockade of sanctioned oil tankers from Venezuela as part of an ongoing pressure campaign against president Nicolas Maduro’s government.
Hundreds of US troops and ships have been stationed near the Venezuelan coastline, where US forces last week seized an oil tanker in the latest attempt to inflict economic damage on Caracas.
In a post on Truth Social on Tuesday, Trump boasted that Venezuela was “completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America”, warning that “it will only get bigger”.
He demanded that Venezuela “return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us”.
Caracas described Trump’s announcement as a “grotesque threat”.
Venezuela has control over the largest known oil reserve in the world, producing around 1 million barrels a day.
Its oil reserves are found primarily in the Orinoco Belt, a region in the country’s east which covers around 55,000 square kilometres.
The country’s proven reserves are estimated at more than 303 billion barrels, which is the largest reserve worldwide – trumping Saudi Arabia’s 297.7 barrels.
Venezuela’s crude oil reserves are six times larger than that of the US, which as of 2023 had 46 billion barrels.
In 2009, the United States Geological Survey estimated that the Orinoco Belt alone contains 900 to 1,400 billion barrels. Of this, it said between 380 and 652 billion barrels are recoverable.
The belt holds heavy crude oil, which is harder and more expensive to extract than conventional oil. Advanced technology is required to produce usable oil from this region.
Despite its natural resources, Venezuelan exports stood at just $4.05 billion in 2023, according to figures in the Observatory of Economic Complexity. This is a fraction of the $122 billion exported by Russia and $181 billion by Saudi Arabia the same year.
Venezuela’s state-owned oil company PDVSA sells most of its exports at a steep discount on the black market in China – because the country has been locked out of global oil markets due to US sanctions imposed by Trump.
Since the US imposed first energy sanctions on Venezuela in 2019, traders and refiners buying Venezuelan oil have resorted to using a “shadow fleet” of old tankers that disguise their location. They tend to have mysterious ownership and operate without standard insurance. Many have been sanctioned for transporting oil to Russia or Iran.
