Trump's “Biggest Oil Deal in History” With Venezuela Rests on a Law That Doesn't Exist

The White House and Caracas signed an agreement on 02.09.2026 handing a newly formed vehicle, North American Blue Energy Partners, 100-year concessions over seventeen Venezuelan oil fields holding some 65 billion barrels of proven reserves — the kind of number that let Washington call it the “biggest oil deal in world history”. Foreign Policy's Keith Johnson points out the inconvenient detail: Venezuelan law caps oil concessions at twenty-five years, so the headline term is not a negotiating triumph but a legal fiction that could unravel the moment a court, or a less accommodating government in Caracas, decides to test it. Several of the seventeen fields are already run jointly with Chinese and Russian partners under contracts with state oil firm PDVSA, setting up a jurisdictional collision Washington has not resolved. Trump has also suggested the deal effectively transfers ownership of Venezuela's subsoil minerals to the United States, a claim Venezuelan officials — even those installed with Washington's blessing — have had to publicly contradict, since the constitution reserves the subsoil to the republic irrevocably. Analysts cited in the piece say first oil from the new fields is realistically ten to fifteen years away, meaning the deal will do nothing for gas prices before the midterms it appears timed to help. The deeper problem, Johnson argues, is durability: no foreign oil concession has survived a full Venezuelan presidential term since the 1970s, and this one asks investors to trust a term twenty-five times that long, agreed with a government whose own claim to power rests on the capture of Nicolás Maduro rather than an election.