Photoseries: Inside Venezuela’s Broken Oil Infrastructure
Trump says US will “get back stolen" oil fields. Here’s what they’ll be getting
The year started with a bang. On January 3, 2026, U.S. forces kidnapped Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro. In the two days after, it seems that everyone has expressed an opinion on how they were able to do this, whether it was justified or legal, and whether Venezuelans are happy or not about it. Writing more on that would feel like beating a dead horse.
I spent the morning chatting with a friend about a different question: what comes next? Specifically – what comes next for Venezuela’s oil fields?
Trump was pretty explicit about his intentions: We are going to run the country,” he said in a January 3 press conference. “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”
Again, setting aside the issue of international law, ethics, or global order, Trump hit the nail on the head. Whoever steps into the void here will have to spend a boatload under circumstances that may or may not make sense.
Venezuela’s Orinoco Belt contains an estimated 1.2 trillion barrels of oil resource (not to be confused with proven reserves), but these are hard to produce and require significant capital investment to get out of the ground. These would only “pay off only if oil prices rise,” Robert Rapier, who covers the energy sector for Forbes, wrote in 2019.
They haven’t. The price of crude is about the same today as it was, on average, in 2019. Bent crude is even lower.
In the meantime, what there is of Venezuela’s current oil infrastructure is in shambles. About half is in the state of Zulia, where oil infrastructure lies in ruins, turning Lake Maracaibo into an unfishable natural disaster (see video below).
At the January 3 Press Conference, Pete Hegseth said that President Trump was “deadly serious about getting back the oil that was stolen from us.”
Here are some shots I took in Zulia in 2022 and 2023, of what it is the US will be getting back. The infrastructure has not improved since.
