US Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright will meet with oil executives this week to discuss US companies once again standing up drilling for oil in Venezuela, a spokesperson for the Energy Department said.
Wright will meet with the executives at the Goldman Sachs Energy, CleanTech & Utilities Conference in Miami, the spokesperson said. Bloomberg News first reported on Wright’s planned meetings.
The meetings come as much of the industry has been blindsided by President Donald Trump’s decision to capture Nicolás Maduro and his subsequent insistence that private companies would pour billions of dollars into rebuilding Venezuela’s oil infrastructure, an industry source told CNN.
As of Monday, major companies and trade associations were still waiting to hear from the White House, the industry source said, and had little clarity on what comes next.
These meetings are expected to be the first of many, two energy industry sources said, as Wright faces the difficult task of persuading major oil companies to invest billions of dollars to return to a market where many suffered significant financial losses. One source characterized the effort as nearly impossible.
“With both the geopolitical issues facing the country and with migration out of the country, a lot of the expertise has left the country,” said one oil and gas industry source who has spoken to Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum about Venezuela. “One of the objectives the United States is going to face here is just providing basic infrastructure and keeping the lights and water on.”
In other words, standing up a US presence in Venezuela’s oilfields won’t happen overnight, or even in a year, the source said.
“This is probably going to take at least a decade,” the source added.
Company safety is going to be “absolutely paramount and a necessary condition for a necessary level of investment to unfold,” another industry source said.