President Donald Trump's administration is in talks with Venezuela's interim government about the United States taking an ownership stake in the South American country's vast oil resources, the news site Axios reported.
The discussions involve more than a dozen productive oil fields with 90 billion barrels of proven reserves — about a third of Venezuela's total proven reserves of 300 billion barrels, the report said on Thursday, citing two unnamed US officials.
In return for a US ownership stake, private companies, including American firms, would develop the fields and return more oil revenue to Venezuela, according to Axios.
Another report by Reuters news agency, citing sources with knowledge of the talks, said that the agreement, which could be signed and made public soon, is expected to operate so that the US government can lock in a group of Venezuelan oilfields for development by American companies.
"This is real and being discussed at the highest levels of the US and Venezuelan governments," one of the sources said.
A separate source said a "lease" was in consideration as the legal model to make the deal work, with a further auction or tender to allocate each one of the fields among US producers.
Doubling US reserves
Venezuela has the world's largest proven oil reserves.
The deal would more than double US oil reserves at a time when the US strategic petroleum reserve is at a 40-year low, the Axios report said.
Nearly eight months after the US deposed former Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro in a military raid, interim president Delcy Rodriguez has sought to open Venezuela to foreign investment, particularly in the energy sector.
She runs Venezuela under strong pressure from Trump, who wants to take charge of the country's oil industry.
The Trump administration has been urging US companies to invest in Venezuela, but they remain wary due to dilapidated infrastructure and past appropriation of assets of foreign investors by the government in Caracas.
Chevron, the only US oil company that was still operating in Venezuela when Maduro was ousted, said in July that it had raised its daily crude production to 280,000 barrels and plans to increase output by 50 percent by the end of 2028.
