By Georgina McCartney
HOUSTON (Reuters) -Chevron , the only U.S. oil producer now working in Venezuela’s oilfields, has not held any discussions with President-elect Donald Trump’s team over the company’s operations in the country, CEO Michael Wirth said on Friday.
Since 2019, Venezuela’s oil industry has been under U.S. sanctions designed to curb its oil income and force out President Nicolas Maduro in response to electoral fraud following his re-election in 2018 and a disputed election in 2024.
Chevron has been allowed since 2022 to export oil to recoup unpaid dividends from joint venture partners.
It aims to support U.S. policy on Venezuela while providing a better future to Venezuelans, Wirth said in remarks to think tank Atlantic Council.
“We are trying to hang in there, work with our government,” Wirth said.
“As other companies have left Venezuela, they’ve been replaced, by and large, with companies from two countries, Russia and China and if we were to leave, that, no doubt, is where the operations that we’re involved with would likely end up as well,” he added.
The easing of restrictions on Chevron and other oil firms came under the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden and it is unclear what the incoming Trump administration’s policy will be.
Oil shipments last month to the U.S. from Venezuela by Chevron under a 2022 authorization from the Biden administration were 238,000 barrels per day.
Wirth also talked about the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which the government is working to replenish after its biggest sale ever in 2022 left levels at their lowest in 40 years.
“If (the SPR) is no longer needed, we ought to come to that conclusion. If it is needed, I think there ought to be some guardrails around its use that are a little bit stronger than the ones that exist today,” Wirth said.
And on Iran, Wirth noted that current U.S. sanctions have not really kept Iranian barrels out of the market, but rather redirected them.
“And that is true for a lot of the sanctions that are in place right now. They haven’t really crimped supply. They’ve just redirected supply,” Wirth said.
(Reporting by Georgina McCartney in HoustonEditing by Nick Zieminski)
