At Campo Boscán, a vast complex in western Venezuela, the drills, pumps and pipelines that extract crude oil operate amid decay: roads are broken, weeds grow everywhere and many wells run inside metal cages to prevent theft. Albenis Merchán, a drilling technician with 35 years’ experience, recalls better times as he drives his pickup through the desolate landscape.
“We used to receive maintenance and safety training all the time. Supplies and spare parts were never lacking. Many things need to improve here to tap the full potential of this area,” he says.
Campo Boscán lies 40km (25 miles) from Maracaibo, the capital of Zulia state, a region that has supplied crude to the global market for more than a century. The field was discovered in 1945 by the Richmond Exploration Company and each day still produces more than 100,000 barrels of the up to 1m barrels produced daily by Venezuela.
Despite the neglect, this remains a privileged field. When the late president Hugo Chávez nationalised the energy industry in 2006, almost all large foreign companies left the country. Chevron stayed, and since 2022 it has controlled this complex alongside the state company PDVSA through a joint venture called Petroboscán, in which the US company holds 40% and PDVSA 60%.
The partnership is considered something of a preliminary stage toward a new commercial relationship between the US and Venezuela. After the capture of Nicolás Maduro by Donald Trump’s administration, other leading energy companies are considering returning to the South American country to exploit the world’s largest oil reserves.
Amid the worsening climate crisis, South American and Caribbean countries are experiencing an oil boom after discoveries of new deep-water deposits off Guyana, Suriname, and the north-eastern coast of Brazil.
On 9 January, at a meeting Trump held with executives from the largest energy companies, Chevron’s vice chairman, Mark Nelson, estimated that the company could increase its output in Venezuela from the current 240,000 barrels a day by up to 50% within 18 to 24 months.
Yet, even with Trump’s intervention and Maduro’s capture, oil industry leaders remain hesitant to invest in the country due to its history of political instability and regulatory uncertainty. Facing pressure from the US president, who wants to use Venezuela as an example of how to intervene in Iran, industry executives at the sector’s annual CeraWeek conference in Texas last month indicated that they remain divided.
But Chevron’s words have stirred expectations at Campo Boscán, where employees and contractors eagerly await a recovery. “The optimisation department is studying each well. They need to determine the best method to get more out of them,” says Merchán as he drives across the complex.
Before launching this new opening, however, Venezuela had to resolve a legal obstacle. The government of Delcy Rodríguez, the interim president, has pushed through the national assembly an urgent reform of the hydrocarbons law, the statute that nationalised the industry two decades ago.
At that time, hundreds of companies lost fortunes in the country, thousands of jobs vanished, and oil infrastructure faced its worst crisis in history.
The new law restores the possibility of producing and exporting crude with minimal participation of the Venezuelan state. In mid-February, sealing an alliance unthinkable under Maduro, US energy secretary Chris Wright visited another field in eastern Venezuela operated by Chevron and PDVSA alongside Rodríguez.
The Trump administration has informed all interested companies that $100bn (£750m) in investment will be needed to revive the country’s productive capacity in the coming years.
Francisco Monaldi, director of the Latin America energy programme at Rice University in Texas, says one priority will be restoring the electricity infrastructure, which is subject to frequent blackouts after years of underinvestment.
“Chevron has had to generate its own electricity to avoid relying on the transmission grid,” Monaldi says.
Venezuela also needs specialised talent, as Chávez fired 20,000 PDVSA workers after a general strike in 2003, and many more people emigrated in the largest exodus in the western hemisphere.
In late January, the entrances to the University of Zulia in Maracaibo were partially closed, and no students were visible. Its engineering school used to be first-rate, producing hundreds of graduate professionals each year who moved almost automatically into the industry.
Despite the diaspora, Monaldi believes the hands extracting local crude will be Venezuelan. “Many foreign companies have them on their payrolls and are identifying them. That’s happening here, in Houston. Venezuelans have family in their country and will find it easier to adapt,” he says.
Those still working inside the country consider a return essential. “Young engineers who arrive don’t know anything, and they don’t want to learn either,” says Merchán, who often has to visit wells where inexperienced workers ask for his help.
César Parra, former director of the Zulia oil chamber, is optimistic. Sitting in an office overlooking the city’s streets, the sparse traffic passing below, he says the region can still export 20bn barrels from its reserves, spread across the shores and beneath Lake Maracaibo, a large body of fresh water heavily polluted by extraction.
Below the surface lies a navigation channel that also requires investment and maintenance to accommodate the transit of large vessels.
Private-sector investment from domestic and foreign companies will be essential. Using historical production data, Parra points to every rise and fall.
“In the different nationalisations, in 1976 and in 2006, there were declines driven by political decisions. Every time the private sector takes over operations, we generate more barrels. And every time the state takes control, we go down,” he says.
But the most significant obstacle on the long road to recovery is institutional. Rodríguez, Maduro’s former vice-president, is a sanctioned official now overseen by the US, governing with much of the structure that supported the deposed leader.
She has shown pragmatism, granting advantageous concessions to the Trump administration and leading international companies. Yet her government lacks legitimacy, and only the opposition, led by Nobel peace prize winner María Corina Machado, enjoys majority support among the population.
It is also not enough to reform the hydrocarbons law and to approve a partial amnesty for hundreds of people persecuted for political reasons. The regime that has governed Venezuela for 27 years appropriated the state and enacted numerous regulations that undermine human rights and private property.
Political prisoners remain in the country; there is no separation of powers nor a functioning democracy.
According to the first surveys conducted after Maduro’s capture, this landscape does not satisfy Venezuelans’ desire for freedom, nor does it inspire confidence in companies such as ExxonMobil, whose chief executive, Darren Woods, recalls the expropriations the company suffered and describes Venezuela as “uninvestable”.
Monaldi says uncertainty also exists in the US. “Trump could lose the midterm elections, and his administration has less than three years left. That’s why the only viable short-term investments are those by the few companies reinvesting part of what they already earn in Venezuela. Those are Chevron, Maurel & Prom and Repsol,” he says.
According to Opec, Venezuela holds more than 300bn barrels of reserves, with 80% of it in the Orinoco belt in eastern Venezuela.
Zulia state, an exporter for decades, has already extracted most of its wealth and today accounts for just 7% of the national total. Even so, in this part of the country, everyone eagerly awaits reactivation, trusting that its benefits will feed different sectors of the economy.
At Campo Boscán, among neighbouring farms where cows chew dry grass, Merchán also looks to the future with high expectations. He and thousands of other Venezuelan workers hope the reopening will align their wages with expenses in a de facto dollarised economy where the population has grown abruptly poorer.
Venezuelan oil once again promises abundance and wellbeing for generations to come. Many people’s ambitions far exceed the gradual and difficult response that any turnaround will demand. But in the short term, Venezuela has few other sources of income.
That is why Merchán, and millions of despairing Venezuelans, see this stage as a potential bonanza within their grasp. “There are many wells here that are already drilled and ready to be exploited,” he says. “All that’s missing is installing the pumps, and they’ll start producing right away.”