On paper, Venezuela has enough oil reserves to maintain production at current levels for more than 800 years, an enticing prospect for the White House as it pushes Big Oil to get the petrostate gushing again.But the South American nation’s claim that it sits atop more than 300bn barrels, 17% of the world’s total and surpassing even Saudi Arabia, has long been questioned by some industry experts — including the very firm hired to help evaluate the resource under the late socialist icon Hugo Chávez. More realistic estimates peg Venezuela’s reserves at around a third or less than the marquee label.Proven reserves refer to the estimated amount of crude that with reasonable certainty can be commercially recovered under current economic, technological and regulatory conditions, a threshold that Venezuela’s veteran oil engineers and other experts have long maintained the country’s claim doesn’t meet.When Venezuela’s national oil company contracted a resource certification consultancy to evaluate the vast Orinoco Oil Belt in the late-2000s, experts say the Chávez government seized on — and embellished — the results to project political influence at home and abroad at a time of spiraling oil prices and resource nationalist fervor. The claim stuck and later helped the country to access more financing.“Some of the numbers that were accredited to our firm were not necessarily exactly what we were calculating,” said Herman Acuna, president of Houston-based Ryder Scott that assessed the full belt in stages from 2008 to 2011, using logs from Petroleos de Venezuela SA. Ryder Scott issued public clarifications at the time to highlight the contingent nature of the resources, he said.National oil companies like PDVSA sometimes “take liberties” with the data to showcase their countries’ potential, said Acuna, who headed up the project at the time.To be sure, even accounting for some fuzziness in the data and the sludgy nature of most Venezuelan oil, conservative estimates still suggest a colossal volume of oil lies in the ground, keeping the Opec nation firmly in the big leagues. But the questions surrounding Venezuela’s reserves highlight how such widely touted data can be politicized and distorted, rendering it unreliable at best and highly misleading at worst.Venezuela’s proven reserves would be far less than the country’s official claim, said Rice University energy expert Francisco Monaldi. He said a conservative estimate would be “about 110bn barrels.”The volume of Venezuelan oil that’s economically viable to produce today is smaller still. In a new calculation reflecting the post-Maduro landscape, Oslo-based research firm Rystad Energy estimates that number at 60bn barrels.PDVSA and the oil and information ministries didn’t immediately reply to requests for comment.For investors, the reserves issue is ultimately a “red herring,” said Luis Pacheco, a former senior PDVSA executive. “Even if the reserves were 50bn barrels, rather than 300bn barrels, Venezuela could produce 3mn barrels for 45 years.”Such lofty numbers help explain why Venezuela remains attractive to big oil companies like Chevron Corp and ConocoPhillips, in a world with dwindling opportunities to substantially bulk up their balance-sheet reserves. In Venezuela, they can recover old debts and meet demand from US Gulf Coast refineries.Chevron is the only major oil company that currently has US authorization to pump Venezuelan oil, but others are expected to get a green light soon now that the US has captured strongman Nicolas Maduro and vowed to reopen the country’s economy to foreign investment.The campaign to recalculate Venezuela’s oil wealth, dubbed Proyecto Magna Reserva Petrolera, came at a politically charged moment in the 2000s.The Chavez administration, including his long-serving Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez, had sacked thousands of PDVSA’s experienced engineers and managers who had gone on strike to protest state meddling. Then, the government took over Exxon’s and ConocoPhillips’s assets in 2007, putting a diminished PDVSA back in control.To get to the dizzying 300bn barrel figure, the government inflated the assumption around how much of the Orinoco oil could realistically be produced, Monaldi and other oil experts said. The official 20% threshold of oil in place — or the total volume of the resource — that the politicians deemed to be recoverable was more than double what had been achieved by PDVSA and its partners.“In reality, Venezuela has only achieved about a 7% to 8% recovery,” Monaldi said.The politicians had also expediently set aside the poor quality and questionable economic and technical viability of most of the resources, said Venezuelan oil engineer Gustavo Coronel, who was among PDVSA’s first board directors in the 1970s.Still, “Venezuela boasted that it had the largest oil reserves on the planet, and people repeated it like parrots,” said Coronel.The Chavez government invited ideologically aligned state-owned oil companies from Uruguay to Belarus to plant a flag in the Oil Belt, even though none had the expertise or access to capital to invest there. Big refineries and pipelines that Chávez promised never materialized.Oil prices collapsed not long after Chavez’s death in 2013, and under his hand-picked successor Maduro, Venezuela’s production tumbled in a haze of mismanagement, underinvestment and corruption. Sanctions accelerated the decline.“Venezuela could be producing perhaps 10 times as much if those same resources were, say, in Texas with the institutions and taxes of Texas,” said Monaldi. Canada, which has heavy oil similar to Venezuela’s, produces more than four times as much, he added.The country is estimated to need upwards of $100bn in investment over a decade to get back to its last sustained peak of more than 3mn barrels a day reached in the 1990s.To arrive at its 60bn barrel calculation, Rystad factored in better access to technology, the lifting of US oil sanctions, a favorable investment climate and political stability — all assumptions that have yet to be fulfilled. Its previous 2024 calculation of 27bn barrels was based on a full-sanctions scenario.With a realistic oil price and investment commitments, Rystad’s latest estimate is enough to return Venezuela to its peak over the next 20 years “and maintain this level for a very long time,” according to Rystad’s Deputy Head of Research Artem Abramov. Venezuela is currently producing less than 1mn barrels a day.Despite the questionable foundations for Venezuela’s reserves claim, the national number is published by Opec and other sources, mainly because there is no audited alternative. Chevron only calculates its own reserves in the country.Compared to Saudi Arabia, whose lighter oil is cheaper and easier to produce, Venezuela’s extra-heavy Orinoco grade requires blending with lighter crude oil or naphtha, a form of diluent, or sophisticated plants to upgrade it. International oil companies built four such plants in Venezuela in the 1990s, but today only one them, run by Chevron, is operating.As the Trump administration moves to control more of the country’s oil supply under new interim President Delcy Rodriguez — who has run the industry as oil minister since 2024 — international prices for the commodity will be critical.Rystad Partner and Head of Emerging Markets Schreiner Parker said Venezuela could boost current daily production by around a third, or roughly 300,000 barrels, at a break-even cost well below current price levels. Beyond that production threshold, the costs start to go up, requiring higher oil prices to justify investment.If oil companies decide to invest, they would seek to certify their share of reserves, as Chevron has, in the context of their own production projects.For now, Exxon Mobil Corp’s top executive Darren Woods said in a White House meeting this month that Venezuela is “uninvestable” without structural above-ground changes, including legal and tax reforms.The bigger question of how much total oil lies beneath Venezuela will likely remain opaque. Verifiable economic data remains scarce, and it’s too early to tell if US involvement will bring greater transparency.“On the question of oil reserves, there is no such thing as objective truth,” Parker said. “Think about Russia, Venezuela or Saudi Arabia, where are you gonna get an empirical benchmark there that can be trusted?”
