BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — Environmental experts warn that U.S. efforts to modernize and boost Venezuela’s vast oil reserves could worsen decades of ecological damage and increase pollution from global warming in a country already struggling with the legacy of a declining oil industry.
The warnings come as Washington has stepped up pressure on Venezuela following the capture of former president Nicolás Maduro last weekend. Since then, the United States has moved to assert control over Venezuelan oil exports, the country’s main source of revenue, by seizing tankers said to be carrying crude, violating US sanctions and signaling plans to redirect Venezuelan oil to global markets under US supervision.
The Trump administration has said it plans to sell 30 million to 50 million barrels of Venezuelan crude worldwide, though it did not specify a timeframe. The proceeds would be held in US-controlled accounts, which the administration says would benefit both Venezuelans and Americans.
Industry analysts warn that significantly expanding Venezuela’s oil production would require years of investment and tens of billions of dollars to repair crumbling infrastructure, raising questions about how quickly — or if — Trump’s plans could realistically be achieved.
“You have storage facilities that are literally sinking into the ground, broken wells and generally degraded infrastructure,” said Paasha Mahdavi, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies energy governance and political economy.
Venezuela’s oil reserves are believed to be the largest in the world, at around 300 billion barrels. The country, which stretches from the Caribbean coast to the northern Andes, is already highly exposed to oil pollution and ranks among tropical countries with the fastest rates of deforestation, according to Global Forest Watch, an online monitoring platform hosted by the World Resources Institute. It produces heavy crude oil that emits far more pollution than most other forms of petroleum. That’s because it takes more energy to extract and refine, which often involves burning natural gas, mainly methane, a powerful planet-warming greenhouse gas.
Revival of Venezuela’s oil industry would worsen environmental damage in a country already plagued by spills, gas leaks and dilapidated infrastructure, with higher production expected to increase climate emissions and increase risks of leaks into fragile ecosystems, several experts have warned.
Venezuela’s Political Ecology Observatory, an environmental watchdog, documented nearly 200 oil spills from 2016 to 2021, which were largely unreported by authorities. Satellite data from Global Forest Watch, an online forest monitoring platform hosted by the World Resources Institute, shows that Venezuela has lost about 2.6 million hectares of tree cover – about the size of the US state of Vermont – over the past two decades, mostly from agriculture, mining and fires, although oil activity has contributed to forest loss in some producing regions.
According to a 2025 report by the International Energy Agency, the intensity of methane emissions, or the ratio of methane released to natural gas produced, was well above the norm in Venezuela’s oil and gas operations, with upstream methane emissions estimated to be about six times the global average. Flaring intensity, or the volume of natural gas burned for oil produced, was about 10 times higher than typical global levels.
The White House referred questions from The Associated Press to the Energy Department, which said in a statement that the U.S. oil and gas companies that would renew Venezuela’s oil industry have “the highest environmental standards.”
“As US investment in Venezuela increases, you can expect environmental conditions to improve,” the statement said.
A new oil infrastructure is needed
Venezuela’s thick, sticky crude has a high sulfur content, making it harder to extract and refine than other oil, such as the lighter oil produced from U.S. shale fields, said Diego Rivera Rivota, senior research associate at Columbia University’s Center for Global Energy Policy.
“It’s very dense, very sloppy, very heavy. And it’s also very sour,” Rivota said. “What that means in practical terms is that it requires, compared to other types of oil resources, more infrastructure, more energy use – it’s much more energy intensive – and therefore much more carbon intensive.”
However, many US refineries were designed decades ago to process this type of oil, making Venezuelan crude a good match despite its higher processing requirements.
Even a modest increase in Venezuela’s oil production could have climate consequences on the scale of entire countries, said Mahdavi of the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Mahdavi said increasing production by about 1 million barrels a day — a level often cited as a short-term goal — would add about 360 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year from production. Pushing production further to about 1.5 million barrels a day could result in annual emissions of about 550 million tons, he said, comparable to the emissions from about half of all gasoline vehicles in the United States.
“That’s just the production side,” Mahdavi told the AP, noting that much higher emissions are generated when the oil is ultimately burned by consumers.
Patrick Galey of the nonprofit Global Witness said Venezuela’s oil system is among the worst maintained in the world after years of underinvestment, with outdated pipelines, storage facilities and widespread gas flaring increasing the risk of leaks and methane leaks. He said any rapid effort to expand production is likely to prioritize production over controlling pollution, worsening climate and environmental damage.
Kevin Book, director of research at ClearView Energy Partners, said there could be efforts to make Venezuela’s oil production more efficient, both economically and environmentally, with a significant amount of investment.
“The new investment will bring the latest technologies in methane capture and emissions management, not just because of environmental goals, but because there is a valuable resource that needs to be captured and sold,” Book said. “And because of that, there’s actually a potential relative environmental advantage over the status quo, assuming oil demand is going to increase anyway.”
In recent public remarks, US officials have focused on controlling oil sales, revenue and infrastructure repairs, without mentioning environmental protection measures or climate impacts. President Trump, in both his first and second terms, has repeatedly rejected the scientific consensus on climate change and rolled back environmental and clean energy policies.
Impact on the already fragile environment
In Caracas, Antonio de Lisio, an environmental professor and researcher at Venezuela’s Central University, said the country’s oil exploitation has long gone hand-in-hand with environmental damage, leaving decades-old pollution that has never been fully addressed.
He said Venezuela’s heavy oil reserves lie in fragile plains crisscrossed by slow-moving rivers, a geography that can amplify the effects of spills.
“Any oil spill has the potential to get worse because these aren’t fast-moving rivers, they’re slow-moving waters,” de Lisio said, referring to the morichales — palm swamp wetlands common in eastern Venezuela where contamination can persist for long periods.
He said energy-intensive processing plants that use heat, chemicals and large amounts of water to make crude oil difficult to export pose additional risks to the environment, particularly in fragile river systems.
Environmental damage has persisted even as oil production has declined, he said, pointing to Lake Maracaibo — a shallow lake in western Venezuela that has been drilled for oil for more than a century — as one of the world’s most heavily polluted ecosystems. He said spills and contamination have also affected other regions, including areas near the Paraguana refinery complex and protected coastal parks such as Morrocoy, where pollution has devastated marine life and coral reefs.
The true environmental and social costs of Venezuela’s oil have never been fully calculated, de Lisio said.
“If these costs were fully taken into account, we would see that continued oil production is not the best deal for Venezuela.”
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Associated Press writer Alexa St. John contributed from Detroit.
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