Energy Secretary Chris Wright told POLITICO he will soon travel to Venezuela to meet its leaders and discuss the future of its state-run oil company — but he insisted that the Trump administration’s interests in the resource-rich nation don’t revolve around oil.
In an exclusive interview for the POLITICO Energy podcast, Wright said that deposing former leader Nicolás Maduro was “not a move for more oil supply,” and that the country’s world-leading crude reserves were never a “meaningful part of the decision-making.”
“This was a geopolitical problem of a country that was a threat to all of its neighbors, a threat to the Western hemisphere, and a massive exporter of guns, of drugs, of criminals,” Wright said. “It may be a nice coincidence, but it is coincidental that Venezuela’s main product and giant resource is oil.”
In the weeks since the U.S. military raid that captured Maduro, President Donald Trump has repeatedly declared that the U.S. would rebuild Venezuela’s oil sector to the benefit of American consumers. “One of the things the United States gets out of this will be even lower energy prices,” Trump told oil executives at the White House last month — despite public skepticism from executives such as Exxon Mobil CEO Darren Woods that the still-unstable country is a viable place to invest.
