![COLUMN | Great expectation: Venezuela's curious oil deal with NABEP as Chevron goes full throttle on Caracas [Offshore Accounts]](http://media.assettype.com/bairdmaritime%2F2026-09-07%2Fpp7y9vu5%2FUntitled-November-24-2025-at-09.11.06.jpeg?w=480&auto=format%2Ccompress&fit=max)
No sooner had we noted the record-breaking time five month stint at the top of the UK singles chart for “Rein Me In” by Sam Fender and Olivia Dean, and had written a piece on how Alphard Maritime needed reigning in, than the duet was promptly booted down the chart by Ella Langley and her country cross-over song “Choosin’ Texas.”
Moving up to number two is twenty-year-old English vocalist Sienna Spiro and her sultry tune “Great Expectation”. So, inspired by her Adele-esque vocals, and lyrics that “I sing just to know I'm alive, and I cried all the tears I could cry,” we look at Venezuela, the scene of some of the greatest expectations for the oil and gas industry this week. Will it all end in tears?
Venezuelan crude is notoriously dirty, sulphurous and tar-like, rather like the politics of oil deals in Caracas today.
Over the last week, details have emerged regarding what American President Donald Trump has described as “the biggest oil deal in history.” The plan was for a private company based in Barbados to take over 65 billion barrels of proven reserves in 17 oil fields in Venezuela, and allegedly invest US$100 billion to increase production.
That company is the hitherto unknown North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP) in which the US Government will take a 35 per cent shareholding and will receive the right to 20 per cent of the company’s production “at cost,” whatever that means.
What could possibly go wrong?
In its press release heralding the “historic deal,” NABEP claimed that the arrangement will, “ultimately deliver billions in savings for American consumers and secure a stable and growing strategic supply of oil in the Western Hemisphere. Through billions in purchases of oil infrastructure and equipment from US suppliers, NABEP will also support thousands of manufacturing jobs in the United States.”
Bad luck to any foreign offshore support vessel owners hoping for a share of Venezuela’s oil bounty, then. NABEP and the White House would like the exploitation of the country’s oil reserves to be for the benefit of Americans and to refill the depleted Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) in the USA, which currently stands at its lowest levels since the mid-1980s. This followed successive drawdowns to release oil from the stockpile to prevent US fuel prices rising in the wake of the Russian attack on Ukraine in 2022 and the American and Israeli attacks on Iran in February of this year.
Mr Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform that, “This historic Transaction MORE THAN DOUBLES American Oil Reserves, greatly increases our Oil Supply, and will substantially lower Gas Prices for All Americans, long into the future, while helping to continue to set Venezuela on a course toward Tremendous Success and Great Prosperity” (his capitals, not mine).
The stock held by the US Government in the SPR, a series of underground salt caverns where oil is physically stored close to the US Gulf Coast, is at a current level of 287 million barrels, down from 404 million barrels one year ago, and well below its maximum capacity of 714 million barrels.
In 2021, the SPR stood at over 600 million barrels and had been above 600 million barrels for almost 20 years (here). The need to refill these buffer stocks is likely to be supportive to oil prices even if there is peace between Iran and the US and the Strait of Hormuz is re-opened.
Having ignored the need to refill the SPR in 2025 when oil prices were below US$70 per barrel, and currently facing a national debt of over US$40 trillion, the Trump administration faces the unpalatable prospect of either having no buffer stocks to protect American consumers from exogenous shocks in the oil markets (there are geological reasons why the SPR cannot be drawn down much below 200 million barrels), or paying close to US$40 billion at current oil prices to buy back the stocks the government sold to stabilise prices, and restore the SPR to over 600 million barrels.
Increasing production in Venezuela and obtaining a US sovereign interest in what will likely become the largest producer in the country therefore meets several strategic goals for Trump. The Venezuelan Government of interim President Delcy Rodriguez lacks legitimacy and would likely lose any free and fair election in the country after the looting and economic calamity inflicted on the country by her predecessors Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro. NABEP says that its deal may generate more than US$209 billion in tax revenue for the Venezuelan state, although it is not clear over which time frame that is calculated.
However, Ms Rodriguez cannot oppose any decisions by the US Government, as she was installed as President at the hands of the Americans, with whom she seems to have colluded in the armed arrest and removal to New York of her predecessor Nicolas Maduro on drug charges. Every media report stresses that both he and his wife Cilia Flores have denied the charges in New York, so we will play along and say that, too.
For over a decade Washington, railed at the drug-trafficking ties of the socialist Venezuelan Government and the thuggery of its brutal security services, but all these criticisms ended when Ms Rodriguez took power, even though every other government official remained in place and she had previously been Maduro’s Vice President from 2018. In fact, Ms Rodriguez herself had been sanctioned by the American Government under the Office of Foreign Assets Control since 2018, during Mr Trump’s first term as president. When I say all officials remain in place, I mean, obviously, apart from those of Mr Maduro’s Cuban bodyguards who were shot dead by US special operations forces when he was captured at his palace on the night of January 3.
NABEP is hoping to drill and swiftly increase production both in the shallow water and highly polluted Lake Maracaibo, and onshore in the Orinoco Belt where the tar oil is thick and bituminous, to achieve a goal of achieving one million barrels of oil per day of output.
NABEP’s previous track record in Venezuela was controversial. Until Maduro's abduction in January, Venezuelan oil operations had been tightly constrained by American sanctions.
The company had a partnership with Harry Sargeant III, a Florida-based former US Marine Corps fighter pilot and now asphalt investor and (surprise) Republican party donor who allegedly maintained a stake in NABEP through the American sanctions via Bluewave Properties, an investment company based in (surprise) the British Virgin Islands. His Global Oil Management Group is a player in refining, oil trading and fuel supply. It is privately held and its financial results are not public, so it is hard to assess its profitability.
In early 2024, Mr Sargeant secured the first direct American asphalt export deal from Venezuela, making a deal with state oil company PDVSA, and his wife donated US$300,000 to Trump’s presidential election campaign, as per Prakriti Parul. By March of this year, Tradewinds was reporting that Mr Sargeant was exporting million barrel parcels of Venezuelan crude.
Mr Sargeant then apparently sold his shares in NABEP in August for US$300 million back to Mr Betancourt as per some reports, following a fall-out with the President as per the Miami Herald. It is not clear if other American investors have stepped in to take stakes in the company; maybe investors with surnames starting with “Tr” or “Ku”?
Who knows who else has acquired stakes in the company apart from the US Government and Mr Betancourt, as this was not announced. Readers will be shocked to discover that Barbados is known for its strict secrecy laws that keep beneficial ownership private, and that the country has zero tax rates for international businesses “investing” there.
Amid the turmoil of the Maduro regime, NABEP, with its excellent “connections,” was able to emerge as the country’s second largest private oil producer. Different reports have different figures for the company’s production levels. Researcher Elias Ferrer stated that the company, “reportedly managed to increase production at Petrozamora, on Lake Maracaibo, from 25,000 barrels per day in early 2024 to more than 55,000 in 2025.”
The company boasted on its website in May that, “following a rigorous rehabilitation and modernisation process, the GP-28 has been returned to service under the highest engineering standards.” As the Instagram shots show GP-28 is an aged swamp barge originally built in the 1990s for Ensco, which was taken over by the Venezuelan state oil company. This is not a deepwater drillship, nor is it high technology; this is a piece of 1970s shallow-water technology that has already been nationalised once.
Today, the company says it directly employs over 5,000 people and supports over 10,000 contractor employees across Venezuela. Who is driving this investment in Venezuela?
The deal is an incredible turnaround for Alejandro Betancourt, the majority shareholder in NABEP.
Betancourt is a Venezuelan businessman who made his money in a series of n-bid contracts to build power plants in Venezuela under the populist regime of Hugo Chavez in the late 2000s. His company won US$5 billion in contracts in the electricity sector despite (surprise!) having no previous experience in the electricity sector, as per the BBC.
Despite Mr Betancourt'ssuccess in rebuilding oil production in Lake Maracaibo recently, there have always been shadows over his reputation, as there often are for businessman who make their fortunes in corrupt Third World dictatorships in no bid contracts to state entities. No wrongdoing has ever been proven in a court of law, and we don’t imply it now.
However, we do note that until May of this year, Mr Betancourt was legally unable to leave the UK, which he had made his home (obviously) because he faced a Swiss extradition request over an investigation in Zurich into potential money laundering. He was detained twice by the British police, as per the BBC, and the Spanish authorities raided Alamín Castle, a palatial property that Mr Betancourt owns in the province of Toledo. Four months ago, Switzerland dropped its extradition request. The Washington Post has reported that the then American attorney-general Pam Bondi (now fired) and her then deputy Todd Blanche (who took her job when she got the boot), telephoned Swiss prosecutors earlier to request that the investigation into Mr Betancourt be dropped.
The Zurich public prosecutors’ office told the Financial Times that the extradition request had been withdrawn because of “specific aspects” of UK law. It said that the, “criminal proceedings against the accused remain unaffected and will continue”.
Mr Betancourt is free to travel to Washington, but perhaps skiing in Zermatt will remain out of the equation.
In late August, NABEP announced it was hiring a new lawyer as general counsel. This is Sara Chouraqui, whose previous job was head of the fraud, bribery and corruption division at the UK’s Serious Fraud Office (surprise!). So, she should know her stuff and it is not at all strange that a man accused of money laundering would hire a senior lawyer from the SFO as his company’s head legal counsel.
Ms Chouraqui was quick to point out her boss's good intentions to the Financial Times:
“Mr Betancourt has never been charged with a crime in any jurisdiction. He is dedicated to serving the people of Venezuela by championing the country’s economic revitalisation and, when helpful and appropriate, acting as an intermediary between its government and the United States.”
Isn’t that lovely? Not for Thor Halvorssen, a Venezuelan-born political activist and the head of the US-based Human Rights Foundation, whom the Financial Times described as “a longtime critic of Betancourt.” He told reporters that Betancourt is “a POS that comes along only once per generation.”
Indeed, Transparencia Venezuela found in an investigation in 2017 that Mr Betancourt’s companies had made mark-ups of 138 per cent and 173 per cent on its power-plant contracts with the government, but this enquiry did not result in formal charges. The Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project found that not all the projects had been completed.
But again, perhaps we should listen to the testimony of President Rodriguez herself, who apparently turned to Mr Betancourt as an intermediary with the American Government in the aftermath of Mr Maduro’s seizure in January. She has defended him to the hilt.
"Often a person is judged in the media before in the courts," the interim Venezuelan President said his defence.
Anyway, following the deal with Mr Trump and his flight from Mar a Lago to Caracas, NABEP now controls the rights to commercialise more than 65 billion barrels of proven oil reserves in Venezuela. For how long either Mr Trump and his supporters remain in power, and how long Ms Rodriguez will still be the President of Venezuela (albeit in an interim capacity only), is not clear.
The biggest risk to Mr Betancourt and to NABEP’s plan is political risk. The oil is there and has always been there, but Venezuela’s horrible politics have meant this Caribbean state has been in turmoil for over a century. It has never been stable or well-run, but by 1928, it was the world’s largest oil exporter and second only to the US in volumes of production.
Encyclopaedia Brittanica gives a flavour of Venezuelan history:
"In 1899, General Cipriano Castro, a caudillo from the Andean state of Táchira, descended on Caracas with his provincial army and seized the presidency. As a result, five successive military strongmen from Táchira, known as Andinos, controlled the nation for the next 59 years, except for an interlude in 1945–48.
"Castro ruled from 1899 to 1909. His regime was characterised by administrative tyranny, financial irresponsibility, almost constant domestic revolt, and frequent foreign intervention. The most serious internal uprising occurred in eastern Venezuela in 1902–03. This and subsequent revolts of the early 20th century were put down by General Juan Vicente Gómez.
"Castro’s cavalier treatment of foreign businessmen and diplomats was topped by his refusal to reimburse foreigners for properties that were damaged in domestic insurrections; consequently, Venezuelans suffered a British-German-Italian blockade of their coast in 1902–03 and a Dutch attack upon their navy in 1908. Ill health forced Castro to go to Europe for medical attention in 1908, whereupon Gómez usurped the presidential powers and did not relinquish them until his death 27 years later. Gómez was an effective, if ruthless, dictator.”
Let’s see if NABEP can succeed in delivering its million-barrel production pledge and whether the American Government will obtain 20 per cent of its production “at cost.”
There is another player who may succeed, provided the political winds do not change.
Delcy Rodriguez is also Choosin’ Texas, like Ella Langley.
On September 2, American’s number two oil producer Chevron announced the following:
“[Chevron had] reached agreements with Venezuela that establish updated terms for its joint ventures, supporting future investment, project development and production growth in the country.
"The agreements set out provisions for Chevron’s joint ventures in Venezuela, including enhanced fiscal, commercial and legal terms intended to support durable and competitive long-term investments. As part of the agreements, Chevron has been assigned additional acreage in the Orinoco Belt, where the company has an established position.”
Chevron said that the improved terms meant that it planned to invest over US$7 billion over the next five years, more than doubling production to approximately 600,000 barrels a day.
The company said that it expected a total cost of production of less than US$20 per barrel. In classic Houston corporate speak, Chevron said that Venezuela would be “a platform of differentiated oil growth under Chevron’s disciplined cash management model.”
Under the new agreements, Petroindependencia, a joint venture in which Chevron holds a 49 per cent interest, has been assigned the rights to develop the adjacent Carabobo-1 and Carabobo-2-South-A areas located in the Orinoco Belt of Venezuela.
Everyone knows that Venezuela has billions of barrels of heavy, hard to extract oil. Even harder is the political environment.
I feel that the lyrics of Sienna Spiro are almost aimed at Venezuela:
"You were the best I ever had
If you can't be what I want
And the things you say aren't true
All I need is the great expectation of you."
Everyone has great expectations for Venezuela, but will they really be achieved in a country that has been a graveyard of foreign investment and in almost perpetual political strife for over 200 years since independence from Spain?
I will stick with Guyana, Trinidad and Suriname, thanks.
