On the waters of Lake Maracaibo sits a forest of rusted rigs and idle pump jacks. Once one of the world’s most productive oil patches, the lake and its adjoining city have long been a byword for Venezuela’s collapse.
But in recent weeks, private jets have begun zooming over, carrying executives to the careworn city. French energy firm Maurel & Prom has said it is launching a drill in the lake, and tankers are shipping more crude from Maracaibo’s waters.
Property prices have jumped and some locals have begun to hope that Venezuela’s new US-backed leader may finally reverse the years of decay suffered by the historical heart of the country’s oil industry.
“My phone hasn’t stopped ringing” since the US ousted former leader Nicolás Maduro in January, said an oil services executive in Maracaibo. “Banks want to lend and people want to make deals.”
Interim President Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s former deputy, has overturned the country’s long-hostile relationship with Washington. With American President Donald Trump’s backing and under heavy pressure from the US, the life-long socialist has passed a new hydrocarbons law that drastically weakens state oil firm PDVSA and allows private companies to operate wells directly.
A flurry of interest has followed. Oil and gas majors such as Repsol, Eni and Shell have made agreements. PDVSA, which remains under US sanctions, said this month it had formalised contracts to supply crude and derivatives to the US.
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“There’s a bunch of wildcatters looking around, as well as banks, private equity funds and service companies,” said one Maracaibo-based oil executive who shuttles to the capital on a private jet. “We never thought it would be so fast.”
Washington has begun unwinding “maximum pressure” oil sanctions that were imposed in a bid to oust Maduro. The former leader, who is now awaiting trial on drug trafficking charges in New York, oversaw an economic crisis that decimated oil production and drove about 8mn people to flee the country. GDP contracted by three quarters between 2013 and 2021.
As oil prices surge because of the US-Israeli war with Iran, officials in Caracas and Washington hope Venezuela will profit domestically and help ease US voters’ petrol costs ahead of this year’s midterm elections.
“People are concerned about oil and gas prices in America, and Venezuela with the resources they have, is a huge win for Venezuela and America,” US interior secretary Doug Burgum said this month during a visit to Caracas.
Last year, Venezuela, which has the world’s largest oil reserves, sold most of its crude to China at a discounted price of around $52 per barrel, according to José Guerra, a professor of economics at the Central University of Venezuela. Now, it can export to the US at market rates that have often been around double that figure in recent days.
Analysts say it would take an extraordinary level of investment — more than $100bn over a decade — for Venezuela to return to its heyday of around 3mn barrels a day at the turn of the century. But Venezuelan business lobby groups expect production to climb to about 1.4mn b/d this year, up from about 1mn at the end of 2025. Chevron, which has a licence to operate in Venezuela, boosted production at its joint ventures with PDVSA last year to about 240,000 b/d.
Few places are more in need of investment than Maracaibo, one of the cities hit hardest by Venezuela’s collapse.
It suffered days-long blackouts in 2019 — triggering looting and destruction of property — and they still persist for hours at a time. Industrial parks sit empty, with one stripped for scrap metal. Locals say they have not seen smoke billowing from all three chimneys at the local power plant in decades. Maduro’s moustachioed face still looms from billboards around the city.
But the earliest of green shoots are starting to be felt by some locals in Maracaibo and the surrounding Zulia state, which birthed Venezuela’s oil boom a century ago but has long lost its hydrocarbon pre-eminence to the eastern Orinoco Belt.
“In the last two months, we’ve seen some changes with more trucks going by and more places offering work,” said Mayoris Hinestroza, a civil servant who lives on the shore of the lake in Cabimas, a town so defined by the oil industry that its crest features a pump jack. “When oil flows around here so does work.”
Maurel & Prom’s new drill will be its first in Lake Maracaibo in eight years, the company’s country manager, Jean Michel Bonnet, said at a forum in Caracas this month. Its Venezuelan operations were curtailed last year after the US suspended its licence, along with those of other foreign companies. Last month Washington authorised the company to resume operations and step up production.
Several people in the energy sector hoped that, given the idle equipment already in place, Zulia is well placed for a speedy recovery.
But much of Venezuela’s oil infrastructure has been left dilapidated by years of corruption, mismanagement and US sanctions. As Hinestroza spoke, the lake washed oil-stained flotsam on to the shore, the result of a series of leaks from the creaking network of underwater pipelines. Only one of the four wells opposite her is operating.
Another challenge is attracting human capital, after many skilled engineers and rig workers left the country as PDVSA was politicised under Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chávez.
“Money is easy to come by . . . what isn’t available is finished goods or labour. Those take time,” said Reinaldo Quintero, the vice-president of Vepica, a Caracas-based engineering firm and an energy policy adviser to the government-controlled National Assembly.
Despite executives’ gung-ho expectations, many Venezuelans are yet to reap the benefits of the reopening. Teachers, nurses and pensioners took to the streets across the country on Thursday to demand an increase in the monthly minimum wage, which currently stands at 130 bolívars. After the currency’s collapse in recent years, that equates to about 20 cents.
Maduro routinely repressed such protests. But Rodríguez must walk a tightrope between attracting foreign investment, appeasing Washington, soothing her regime’s hardliners and raising living standards for a population that broadly loathes her government.
A survey by local pollster Meganálisis this month found just 4.4 per cent of respondents support the interim president.
The Maracaibo region’s grinding poverty deepened further after an oil spill in 2023, which upended hundreds of fishermen’s livelihoods, wrecking the expensive nets used to catch prawns and crabs.
But José Luzardo, who leads a community of fishermen, hopes the oil investment will change things.
“We are in a very bad spot with families going hungry and fishing boats stuck on shore,” he said, as a heron, blackened by oil, dived into the lake behind him. “But I’m an optimist, and as companies come back they should bring more work for everyone.”
