BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — Environmental experts warn that a U.S. push to revamp and add to Venezuela’s vast oil reserves could exacerbate decades of ecological damage in Venezuela and increase planet-warming pollution in a country already struggling with the effects of a long-term decline in the oil industry.
The warning comes as Washington steps up pressure on Venezuela following the arrest of former President Nicolás Maduro over the weekend. The United States has since moved to take control of Venezuela’s oil exports, the country’s main source of revenue, seizing tankers allegedly transporting crude in violation of U.S. sanctions and hinting at plans to divert Venezuelan oil to global markets under U.S. oversight.
The Trump administration has said it plans to sell 30 million to 50 million barrels of Venezuelan crude globally, but has not specified a timetable. Proceeds will be held in U.S.-controlled accounts, which the government says will benefit Venezuelans and Americans.
Industry analysts warn that significantly expanding Venezuelan oil production will require years of investment and tens of billions of dollars to repair crumbling infrastructure, raising questions about how quickly or if Trump’s plan can be realistically implemented.
“Storage facilities are literally sinking into the ground, wellheads are broken, and there’s general degradation of the 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 considered the largest in the world, estimated at 300 billion barrels. The country, which stretches from the Caribbean coast to the northern Andes, is already highly affected by 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. The heavy crude oil it produces emits far more pollutants than most other forms of oil. That’s because more energy is needed to extract and refine it, which often involves burning natural gas, much of which is methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that heats the planet.
Several experts have warned that reviving Venezuela’s oil industry will exacerbate environmental damage in a country already plagued by oil spills, gas leaks and crumbling infrastructure, with increased production expected to increase climate emissions and increase the risk of spills in fragile ecosystems.
Environmental watchdog the Venezuelan Political Ecological Observatory documented nearly 200 oil spills from 2016 to 2021, but most went 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 over the past two decades, an area equivalent to the U.S. state of Vermont, mainly due to agriculture, mining and fires, although oil activities have also caused forest loss in some producing areas.
The intensity of methane emissions from Venezuela’s oil and gas operations, or the ratio of methane released to natural gas produced, is well above normal levels, according to a 2025 report from the International Energy Agency, with estimates showing upstream methane emissions around six times the world average. Flaring intensity, the amount of natural gas burned to produce oil, is about 10 times higher than typical levels globally.
The White House referred AP’s questions to the Energy Department, which said in a statement that U.S. oil and gas companies that would revamp Venezuela’s oil industry have “the highest environmental standards.”
“As U.S. investment in Venezuela increases, environmental conditions are expected to improve,” the statement said.
New oil infrastructure needed
Diego Rivera Rivota, a senior fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, said thick and viscous Venezuelan crude has high sulfur content and is harder to extract and refine than other oils, such as the lighter oils produced by U.S. shale fields.
“It’s very thick, very watery, very hard. And very sour,” Rivolta said. “What that actually means is that it requires higher infrastructure, higher energy efficiency – it’s more energy intensive – and therefore more carbon intensive than other types of petroleum resources.”
Still, many U.S. refineries were designed decades ago to process this type of oil, making Venezuelan crude well suited to processing despite its higher processing requirements.
Mahadawi of the University of California, Santa Barbara, said even a small increase in Venezuelan oil production could have climate consequences for the entire country.
Mahdawi said increasing production by about 1 million barrels per day, a level generally seen as a near-term goal, would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by about 360 million tons per year. He said increasing production further to about 1.5 million barrels per day could bring annual emissions to about 550 million tons, equivalent to about half the emissions from gasoline-powered cars in the United States.
“It’s just the production side,” Mahdawi told The Associated Press, noting that when the oil is ultimately burned by consumers, it creates greater emissions.
After years of underinvestment, Venezuela’s oil system is one of the worst maintained in the world, with aging pipelines, storage facilities and widespread natural gas flaring increasing the risk of leaks and methane leaks, said Patrick Ghaly of the nonprofit Global Witness. He said any efforts to quickly expand production would likely prioritize yields over pollution control, a worsening climate and environmental damage.
Kevin Book, research director at ClearView Energy Partners, said efforts to improve the economic and environmental efficiency of Venezuelan oil production could be made through significant investment.
“New investments will bring the latest technology in methane capture and emissions management, not only because of environmental goals, but because there is a valuable resource to capture and sell,” Booker said. “So if you assume oil demand is going to grow anyway, there are actually some potential relative environmental advantages compared to the status quo.”
In recent public speeches, U.S. officials have focused on controls on oil sales, revenue and infrastructure repairs, without mentioning environmental protection or climate impacts. President Trump has spent his first term and now his second term repeatedly denying the scientific consensus on climate change and rolling back environmental and clean energy policies.
Impact on an already fragile environment
In Caracas, Antonio Delicio, an environmental professor and researcher at the Central University of Venezuela, said the country’s oil extraction has long gone hand in hand with environmental destruction, resulting in decades of pollution that has never been fully addressed.
Venezuela’s heavy oil reserves are located on fragile plains crisscrossed by slow rivers, a location that could amplify the impact of a spill, he said.
“Any oil spill has the potential to worsen because these are not fast-flowing rivers, but slow-flowing bodies of water,” DeLisio said, referring to the palm swamp wetlands common in eastern Venezuela where contamination could persist over time.
Energy-intensive processing plants use heat, chemicals and large amounts of water to produce exportable heavy crude oil, which increases environmental risks, especially in fragile river systems, he said.
He said that despite the decline in oil production, environmental damage remained. He noted that Lake Maracaibo is one of the most oil-polluted ecosystems in the world. Lake Maracaibo is a shallow lake in western Venezuela that has been subject to oil extraction for more than a century. He said the spill and pollution had also affected other areas, including areas near the Baraguana refinery and protected coastal parks such as Moroccoi, where pollution had damaged marine life and coral reefs.
DeLisio said the true environmental and social costs of Venezuelan oil have never been fully calculated.
“If you take those costs into full consideration, we see that continuing to produce oil is not the best business for Venezuela.”
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Associated Press writer Alexa St. John contributed from Detroit.
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