Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world. For some commentators, this fact was enough to explain the US military’s abduction of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro on January 3; Donald Trump seemed to confirm the theory when he crowed that “we’re going to be using oil, and we’re going to be taking oil.” Yet it’s unclear whether US oil companies could make money from Venezuela’s oil industry, which ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods has deemed “uninvestable.” To the extent that oil is behind Trump’s desire to “run” Venezuela, his objectives may be more geopolitical than financial.

In the 1970s, seizing Venezuela’s oil might have made sense to US capitalists. Production was booming, and the United States was dependent on oil imports; during the 1973 oil crisis, the US economy suffered while Venezuela achieved the highest per capita income in Latin America. Today the United States is a net energy exporter, in part thanks to the expansion of fracking. Meanwhile, Venezuela’s oil production peaked around the turn of the 21st century. High prices in the 2000s helped fuel the social reforms of Hugo Chávez, who expropriated US oil companies — then the oil market crashed shortly after Maduro took power, which, along with Washington sanctions and economic mis-management, sent Venezuela’s poverty rate soaring from 33% in 2013 to 96% in 2019. Once the world’s third-largest oil producer, Venezuela currently ranks 18th, and its annual output is less than one-third what it was in the 1960s and early ’70s.

In his first administration, Trump’s sanctions helped devastate Venezuela’s economy. Now he promises to “rebuild” the country “in a very profitable way.” The risky investments required to update Venezuela’s petroleum infrastructure and pay down its debts are obstacles to this plan, but a more intractable problem is the oil itself. Three-quarters of the country’s oil reserves consist of extra-heavy crude located in the Orinoco Belt. For oil reserves to be considered proven, they must be economical to extract; the Orinoco Belt received this designation in an era of anomalously high oil prices that offset the costs of exploiting extra-heavy crude. Under realistic long-term prices, that oil might stay in the ground — and any scenario in which Venezuelan oil production does increase might hurt US capitalists by pushing prices below the minimum needed to make fracking viable.