Venezuela has world’s largest oil reserve, but output just 1% of total

Venezuela’s oil industry would “make a lot of money” with the US behind it, President Donald Trump said Saturday in a news conference. “We’re going to have our very large US oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country,” Trump said. He said the Venezuelan oil industry had been “a total bust,” for a long time, adding, “They were pumping almost nothing by comparison to what they could have been pumping.” Trump seems to be counting heavily on US intervention in the oil industry to help transform Venezuela, a proposition that could prove to be expensive.