Over the past two weeks, the Venezuelan government has announced major investment agreements with multinational companies to boost its oil and gas production. The agreements, which aim to reverse years of isolation, have sparked a small celebration among the ruling Chavistas, who are in need of resources to address a severe inflationary and production crisis.

The recently formalized announcements by British Petroleum, Shell, and Slumberger have been months in the making and are taking shape under the framework of U.S. guardianship in the country, in force since January 3, 2026, when former president Nicolás Maduro was captured by U.S. soldiers in Caracas.

Shell, BP, and the firms XRG, from the United Arab Emirates, and UCC Holding, from Qatar, have agreed on a work schedule with the government of Delcy Rodríguez to develop the offshore gas fields of Loran, located in the Deltana Platform in eastern Venezuela. It is a large gas reservoir located along the maritime border with the island of Trinidad, for which there had been plans for investments worth millions, but which had been put on hold due to the crisis in Venezuela’s energy sector.

The first phase of operations was awarded to Shell in June of last year. A consortium consisting of BP and companies from the United Arab Emirates and Qatar will take over Phase 2 of the block. According to sources close to the Venezuelan government, the goal of this entire operation is to begin exporting gas to Europe.

Although it has the largest reserves in Latin America, Venezuela is a mid-sized gas producer, the sixth-largest in the region (behind Argentina, Trinidad, Brazil, Bolivia, and Mexico), with about 31 million cubic meters a year. Part of that output is associated gas from oil extraction.

The most ambitious gas production expansion projects came to nothing during the administration of Hugo Chávez and his oil minister, Rafael Ramírez, amid waste and corruption. Venezuela’s current gas production accounts for only 10% of the regional total.

On oil matters, Participation Productive Contracts were announced with the U.S. corporations Hunt Oil and Crossover, as well as a framework alliance with the U.S.-French consortium Slumberger, a contractor that is also conducting integrated well studies. There is a memorandum of understanding and some sources estimate future investments from these operations at $2 billion.

The arrival of these companies breaks with a static picture of foreign investment in the country’s oil and gas sector under Maduro. That context had been dominated almost exclusively by Chevron, Spain’s Repsol, and Italy’s Eni, which were vying to obtain any additional licenses to maintain operations.

“Venezuela is not only showing the world its vast oil and gas reserves, but also the contractual mechanisms that make it possible to turn those reserves into surface barrels,” said Minister of Hydrocarbons Paula Henao, who closed the Empowering Venezuela forum in Houston at an event before the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. The presence of an official of the Bolivarian revolution at an event to gauge oil investment for Venezuela in the U.S. was completely inconceivable before January 3, 2026.

“What is truly important in terms of international investment is happening in gas,” qualifies Francisco Monaldi, an economist specializing in oil and a financial analyst. “Without a doubt it is good news. Some agreements were negotiated years ago with Shell. In Trinidad there is a gas field on the other side of the border, Manatí, which is the same field; they have developed the production chains for their petrochemical projects. Shell has been working with Trinidad for some time. The business with Venezuela would be very attractive because it is covered by the Gas Law, which has lower royalties and encourages private investment, and because on the Venezuelan side there is no need for major new investments; there is installed capacity. All the gas will be monetized via Trinidad.”

Monaldi sees the oil picture as murkier: companies have not fully migrated to the new legal framework, “there are many uncertainties and operational contracts have been signed that are unclear, leaving enormous discretion to the state. PDVSA has negotiated contracts in detail with private companies. The CPPH (Hydrocarbons Participation Productive Contract) of Hunt Oil and Crossover is the first to be signed under the new law.”

Alejandro Grisanti, managing partner of the firm Ecoanalítica and an international financial adviser, says the national oil sector will have a role in the country’s future growth rates, but warns that it is not yet very large. “There is no doubt that international oil and gas investment has been reactivated in Venezuela. It is being channeled to wells that can achieve the maximum production increase with a small investment. Fields that had been left inactive.”

Grisanti says that in the medium-term much deeper investments will be necessary to expand oil production and return it to former levels, but he believes that the development of the political circumstances will accelerate these processes. Grisanti projects a 5-point GDP growth for 2026 (despite the earthquake), and double-digit positive rates from 2027 onward, for several years. “We foresee an increase of 200,000 barrels per day each year for the country at this pace,” he adds. Venezuela currently produces just over 1.2 million barrels of oil a day, far from the three million of more prosperous times.

Grisanti — who foresees the arrival of capital in a short time — conditions much of the recovery rates on the possibility that a transition to democracy with free elections actually occurs. “If there is no transition, local oil production will have a ceiling of 2.5 million barrels a day in a few years. But if political change is achieved, it could reach four million barrels a day in not much time.”

Venezuelan capital dispossessed

While these agreements are being finalized, a domestically owned company, Delta Finance, run by Oswaldo Cisneros — a 40% shareholder of the mixed company PetroDelta — claimed that it has been “stripped of its assets and had its rights to carry out primary oil exploitation activities revoked through a sanctioning procedure.” Cisneros’s company complains that its stakes in the oil fields of Tucupita, Bombal, Uracoa, El Isleño, Temblador and El Salto in eastern Venezuela, with usage rights until 2042, “have now been granted to the Pacific Coast Energy Company.”

Pacific Coast Energy is an American firm unknown in the local context, whose CEO is the executive Klaus Hasbro. The Venezuelan state argues that PetroDelta breached its obligations in exploration and infrastructure, a claim the company denies and says it is willing to prove.