Pentagon Takes 35% Stake as Venezuela Oil Deal Is Detailed
The White House detailed its Venezuela arrangement: a private firm, North American Blue Energy Partners, receives 100-year concessions on seventeen fields holding some 65 billion barrels — with the US Defence Department taking a 35 per cent stake and the State Department gaining rights to a fifth of output at production cost. The interim government hails a “historic agreement” targeting up to $100bn of investment; a US senator called it “a blatant abuse of power”.
The structure answers yesterday’s questions in ways that raise sharper ones: the Pentagon — not an energy agency, not a sovereign fund — holding equity in a private company operating a occupied country’s oil under a century-long concession is an arrangement without modern precedent, and the “no taxpayer cost” framing sits oddly beside a defence department that now profits directly from the intervention it conducted. The operator’s path from 200,000 to a promised million barrels a day would take years and tens of billions even in a stable country. Congressional pushback has begun; Venezuelan legal challenges await any change of government. Watch whether other institutions — courts, Congress, OPEC — treat the deal as durable, because its economics depend entirely on that belief.