Chevron will double its production in Venezuela with an investment of 7,000 million dollars

US involvement in Venezuela's oil sector expands. The American hydrocarbon giant Chevron will double its production in the South American country in the next five years through an investment of 7,000 million dollars (just over 6,000 million euros at the exchange rate), as the company announced this Tuesday.

Chevron has received the concession of two additional oil fields in the Orinoco belt, the area that, together with Lake Maracaibo, concentrates most of Venezuela's crude oil reserves, which are estimated to be the largest in the world. The American firm currently produces around 280,000 barrels a day in that country and estimates that by 2031 it will reach 600,000 barrels, as indicated.

His announcement comes after Washington announced last Friday an agreement that will allow it to control 21% of Venezuelan crude oil reserves through an association with the company NABEP, owned by Venezuelan businessman Alejandro Betancourt. The Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, has been in Caracas since Tuesday night for meetings related to that operation.

The Houston-based company is the only major oil company in its country active in Venezuela, through a series of joint venture companies with the state firm PDVSA with which it remained operational during the Chavista era after Hugo Chávez renegotiated the contracts in 2007.

Speaking to the CNBC channel from Caracas, Chevron's CEO, Mike Wirth, assured that the new organic hydrocarbon law that Caracas has approved has made investment in the sector more attractive, after a series of changes in the tax and royalty system. "It has gone from not being a very competitive option to being a very attractive option compared to those presented to us in the rest of the world. That is why we are willing to invest significant capital and grow," explained the senior executive.

Other companies have been more cautious about the possibility of returning to Venezuela since the US military operation that captured President Nicolás Maduro on January 3 to transfer him to New York and put him on trial for drug trafficking. In a meeting at the White House last January and broadcast on television, the CEO of ExxonMobil, Darren Woods, went so far as to describe the South American country as “impossible to invest in.”

In part, the operation that the United States Government plans to develop with NABEP aims to open the way for other companies of the North American giant to land in the protected country. It is something that US President Donald Trump addressed with representatives of large companies in the sector in a new meeting at the White House this Tuesday.

The pact that Trump proclaimed last Friday with great fanfare on his social networks foresees that the Pentagon, through its Office of Strategic Assets, will acquire 35% of the company. The interim Government of Venezuela has granted Betancourt's company - investigated in Switzerland and Spain for possible corruption crimes - the rights to exploit 17 oil fields for a century. It is estimated that these fields contain close to 65,000 million barrels of crude oil, 21% of the country's total reserves, estimated at around 303,000 million barrels.

According to the Secretary of Energy, the participation of the US government "increases security and confidence in the rule of law and the inviolability of contracts in Venezuela." “It is one thing for a government to expropriate assets from private corporations,” said Wright, also speaking to CNBC. “It is quite another to expropriate assets that belong to the United States.”