美油企对特朗普委内瑞拉石油协议感到意外

Join us now is Bloomberg White House reporter and my colleague, Jen DeLuen, and Vera Bergengruen of The Wall Street Journal. Jen, Trump has touted this deal as the best deal ever made. This is hyperbole sometimes, when he's talking about deals. Take a listen. There are those that say it was the greatest deal ever made. Let's see what happens. But, you know, I have to stress, it was also a very good deal for Venezuela because you have the most powerful, the richest companies in the world going into Venezuela, where before it was just, it was this unbelievable value that was sitting dormant.

But we're gonna be taking all of that. We're gonna be taking that oil out. You have a new piece out, Jen, that says that oil companies aren't quite as excited about this as the president is. Tell us more. Well, that that's right. I mean, obviously, the, oil industry has seen, president Trump as an ally. Some industry figures say he's given them, nearly everything on their wish list in this second term, but, you know, they they also, complain about what they call friendly fire, and and this is a good example of it.

A number of, you know, we we Bloomberg spoke with a number of oil industry figures, and executives who who said, you know, they felt blindsided by this deal. You know, some of these, folks are are involved in actual they were involved in ongoing commercial talks in Venezuela already. And, you know, this this deal with, North American Blue Energy Partners leaves, you know, fewer leases, fewer fields up for grabs. It also kinda breaks up some of the potential bundles that, companies were in talks with Venezuelan authorities and with the state owned oil company, paid a visa over.

So, you know, there's just less opportunity on the table for some of these companies. You know, it it's, of course, fair to note that that some of this has the tinge, to the president's supporters of of sour grapes, you know, by folks who've lost out. But but the reality is that that some of the biggest, you know, proven, oil companies, with US expertise that were trying to to make a go of it in Venezuela, you know, feel like they're on the other end of this deal and that they could be competing essentially against a a supercharged US government backed competitor in the Latin American country.

Yeah. Vera, I wanna ask you about exactly that because this was a no bid contract to one company, and there are other to which I was just talking about. I mean, Sitco has been operating there, working with PDVSA for years even through the turmoil. There are companies from The US that are already operating there. There is some controversy about how this one company, why this individual got this, got this contract. When you were reporting out this story, I know you've been writing a lot about it.

What are the things that stand out to you as questions that still needs to be answered? I think partly, the timeline. I think one one of the things we've really seen is that the president, you know, really wanted The US to have a way more direct control in Venezuelan oil. He didn't want it wasn't really enough to have these companies get these long timelines and and the scale that he didn't think was fast enough. And so he wanted somebody who would move really quickly.

And the only way you can really do that in Venezuela is to have those kinds of contacts, which some of these oil companies obviously have Chevron, others. But, you know, somebody who can really operate in this murky world because if you know, the the Venezuelan system is still pretty similar to how it was before Maduro was taken out. And so what basically, they needed an insider, somebody who is close to the regime, somebody who can kind of go back into that murky world where this industry has existed for the last thirty years, and that's why they went with this guy, somebody who is part of the old system, who knows how to navigate both Washington and Caracas.

And to me, that's something that really stands out. There weren't really many other options if that's what you wanted. But, obviously, critics say, you know, you're say you say you're remaking the oil industry. We're gonna break with the past. We saw secretary Rubio say, you know, we're we're we're, you know, getting rid of this corruption. And at the same time, they ended up basically regoing back to someone who profited and made himself rich of that same system.

And, of course, that means that he knows how to navigate it. The New York Times and the Washington Post have reported that mister Betancourt has faced several international investigations, including in Spain and Switzerland. CNN has some reporting on this as well. Why did the administration pick him, Vera? You know, so he was an intermediary, before you know, in Trump's first term. He was, again, somebody who was very wealthy, very connected on all sides.

He's somebody who was educated in Boston and Oxford. He just knows how to move in these circles. And what I was told was that that was a pretty important part of it. You know, he doesn't really fit the image of a traditional Venezuelan kinda shadowy operator who got rich in the Chavez era. This is someone who they kind of met, could have gone to college with, trusted, and, you know, who had quite a few inroads in the Trump administration.

He hired Trump's former lawyer, Giuliani, to get out of legal trouble, in his first term and maintain some of those connections and basically earned their trust by serving as an as an intermediary for last year or so. So what, officials told me is that he proved himself. He basically proved himself by showing that he could be trusted. And, again, like, just was willing to move at a scale and at a speed that the oil companies just can't, The US oil companies.

I wanna talk about that speed. Jen, I wanna play some sound from our colleague, Kendall. I interviewed, the energy secretary, just a little while ago, and she asked him about this. This is to bring these fields into real commercial development. But the speed of things, I mean, so far, we have gone at Trump's speed in Venezuela. Venezuela. Country production's up 25. Exports are up 50%. We think even from production today already elevated, that could double by the end of this decade.

Trump's speed. I mean, it has the benefit of pushing through some boundaries, and we talk about this all the time. Like, in diplomacy, sometimes Trump speed actually can be very useful. In this case, what are the drawbacks of possibly going Trump speed when you're looking at something that's as complicated with one, maybe two governments that we don't know how much longer they're going to be around in this current form?

Well, I mean, I think you're you're you're putting the right focus there. You know, clearly, there's a lot of question about the durability of this deal, you know, not just beyond, the president's term, but amid, you know, quite a bit of upheaval in Venezuela, and, you know, with that is ruled by an interim government. You know, there are questions about the ability of North American blue energy partners to really scale up production in the way that the the president clearly administer envisions here.

You know, the president Trump was frustrated by the pace of deal making, you know, since the operation to capture Maduro in January. He'd grown frustrated with the pace of of the transactions, and, you know, we saw Chevron and, Eni and Genova GE Vernova rather, cutting deals this last Wednesday, and those are commercial transactions. But but at the same time, he wanted to see more. And and what you saw with this this transaction with Blue Energy Partners is kind of, you know, his solution to to that problem.

It's it's a big, large entity, unproven, tie up really between The US Government and, this private, corporation now, that, you know, doesn't have, you know, a long track record of developing new fields. You know? Blue Energy Partners has an operating record in Venezuela a

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