Could the US be mainly concerned with Venezuela’s oil? Armed US soldiers seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela this week. “A big tanker, very big even,” Donald Trump told the press at the White House. According to Pam Bondi, the US Attorney General, the ship is involved in an illegal oil transport network.
In Venezuela they call the American action “piracy”, and say that the Americans are mainly after the large oil reserves of the country that has 17 percent of the world’s reserves. Oil is an important source of income for Venezuela, which is not doing well economically. The US denies the Venezuelan accusation.
Tensions between the two countries have been rising since August. Just this week, two US fighter jets flew close to the Venezuelan mainland over the Gulf of Venezuela, violating Venezuelan airspace, according to the South American country.
President Trump previously angered the government there by calling President Nicolás Maduro a major drug trafficker who would lead a drug cartel. Venezuela accuses the US of illegal and immoral military threats. “The true reasons for the aggression against Venezuela have finally been revealed,” Bloomberg news agency quoted a statement from Venezuela as saying. “It was always about our natural resources, our oil.”
Location
It has not been officially announced which ship the Americans boarded. American media assume that it concerns the enormous oil tanker Skipper, 333 meters long and 60 meters wide, with a capacity of 2 million barrels of oil.
The New York Times includes satellite data and photos the sailing movements dived from the oil tanker. That data is confusing; it appears that the ship is deliberately sending out incorrect data about its location.
The ship’s location transmitter indicated that the ship had been anchored in the Atlantic Ocean near Guyana and Suriname for the past few weeks. But according to The New York Times, it was hundreds of miles away, off the coast of Venezuela, from late October until at least December 4. A satellite photo from November 18 shows that the ship is behaving suspiciously, which is also evident from research by The New York Times.
It is common for oil tankers to disguise their location; usually this concerns ships of the so-called darkfleetthe shadow fleet: boats that transport oil from countries against which sanctions have been imposed. The site TankerTanker.com keeps track of their sailing movements as best as possible. According to data published there, the Skipper has transported nearly 13 million barrels of Iranian and Venezuelan oil since 2021, a spokesperson told The New York Times.
Anyone who wants to hit Venezuela should aim for its oil. The country is a founding member of OPEC, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. Its oil reserves are estimated to amount to more than 300 billion barrels (of 159 liters). That stock is much larger than that of the US, which still has 45 billion barrels in the ground, and also more than Saudi Arabia’s 270 billion barrels of reserves.
Nationalization
Despite its enormous reserves, Venezuela produces relatively little oil. In 1997 it reached a production peak of 3.5 million barrels per day. Then growth stalled; When Hugo Chávez came to power, he largely nationalized the oil sector. Mismanagement at the state oil company caused oil production to collapse further after 2015, which was exacerbated by government interventions, an exodus of personnel and poor maintenance of the oil infrastructure.
Oil production has been increasing slightly since 2020. That year production was just above 500,000 barrels per day, it turns out OPEC figures, and last year at about 900,000 barrels per day. Saudi Arabia produced almost 9 million barrels per day in 2024, the US produced 13 million barrels.
In addition to the problems with oil extraction, Venezuela is having difficulty getting rid of its oil. In 2019, during Trump’s first term, the US imposed sanctions on Venezuelan oil, officially due to corruption within the state oil company. The American oil giant Chevron, also active in Venezuela, is exempt from these sanctions.
Punishment measures also apply to the Skipper. Since 2022, the US has placed the ship on a sanctions list due to suspected links to the militant Lebanese group Hezbollah.
The US currently receives about 150,000 barrels of Venezuelan oil per day, including through Chevron. Because Caracas desperately needs oil revenues, the vast majority of its oil goes to other countries at heavy discounts, whether or not via the shadow fleet.
China has been the largest Asian buyer of Venezuelan oil in recent years. According to the Reuters news agency, it would consume almost 750,000 barrels per day, 80 percent of Venezuelan exports. However, China is also awash with competing sanctioned crude oil, from Iran and Russia, forcing Venezuela to offer its oil at increasingly deep discounts.
Following the Skipper’s seizure, Venezuela could find it even more difficult to export its crude oil. Other shipping companies will hesitate if they are now asked to transport Venezuelan oil, insiders tell Bloomberg.
The question remains: what will the US do with the seized oil? According to the BCC Trump said when asked about this: “We’ll keep it, I think.” According to the British news organization, the oil on board the tanker is estimated to be worth more than 95 million dollars (about 81 million euros).
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