The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday lifted key restrictions on Venezuela’s oil trade, allowing U.S. companies to buy, sell, transport, and refine Venezuelan crude.
The move is part of Washington’s growing efforts to reshape the country’s energy sector while keeping tight control over production and revenues.
The decision, announced by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), authorizes U.S. entities to engage in a wide range of commercial activities involving Venezuelan-origin oil. While the measure stops short of lifting sanctions on oil production itself, administration officials said it is designed to ease bottlenecks in the movement of existing supply and pave the way for broader sanctions relief.
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A White House official said the authorization “would help flow existing product” and confirmed that additional easing of restrictions would be announced soon.
The move comes weeks after Trump said the United States intends to control Venezuela’s oil sales and revenues indefinitely following the January 3 U.S. military raid in Caracas that resulted in the seizure of President Nicolas Maduro. Trump has since outlined an ambitious vision for Venezuela’s oil sector, saying U.S. companies should eventually invest up to $100 billion to restore output to historic levels after years of underinvestment, operational decline, and mismanagement.
Already, Washington and Caracas have agreed to an initial sale of 50 million barrels of Venezuelan crude, with European trading houses Vitol and Trafigura handling the marketing of the supply. The new OFAC authorization, issued as a general license, expands access beyond those initial arrangements by opening the Venezuelan oil trade to additional U.S. companies.
Under the license, U.S. firms are permitted to engage in transactions involving the Venezuelan government and state oil company PDVSA related to the lifting, export, re-export, sale, storage, marketing, purchase, delivery, transportation, and refining of Venezuelan oil. The authorization is explicitly limited to established U.S. entities and excludes firms and individuals from countries Washington considers strategic rivals, including China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Cuba.
The license also maintains strict financial guardrails. It does not permit payment structures deemed commercially unreasonable, debt-for-oil swaps, payments in gold, or transactions denominated in digital currencies, reflecting continued U.S. concern about opaque financing mechanisms that have previously been used to circumvent sanctions.
The partial easing marks a notable shift from Trump’s first administration, when the Treasury Department in 2019 designated Venezuela’s entire energy industry under sweeping sanctions following Maduro’s disputed re-election, which Washington refused to recognize. Those measures effectively cut off Venezuela from most international oil markets and deepened the country’s economic crisis.
Several energy companies had been pressing the U.S. government for expanded licenses in recent weeks. Oil producers, including Chevron, Spain’s Repsol, and Italy’s ENI, along with refiner Reliance Industries and some U.S. oil service providers, have sought authorization to expand output or exports from the OPEC member. Any meaningful increase in production, however, would still require additional U.S. approvals.
Jeremy Paner, a lawyer at Hughes Hubbard & Reed and a former OFAC sanctions investigator, said the new authorization is broad operationally, covering refining, transportation, and the physical lifting of oil, but narrow in scope because it applies only to U.S. companies. Kevin Book, an analyst at ClearView Energy Partners, said the move provides regulatory clarity for U.S. firms while preserving the prior case-by-case review for non-U.S. entities.
“In short, it appears to offer ‘America First, Others Ask’ sanctions relief,” Reuters quoted Book as saying.
According to industry sources, a surge in individual license requests had slowed plans to expand exports and attract investment into Venezuela. The general license is expected to reduce that friction for U.S. companies and accelerate near-term oil flows, even as broader questions remain about long-term production growth.
The OFAC decision coincided with significant developments in Caracas. Venezuelan lawmakers on Thursday approved a revised reform of the country’s main hydrocarbons law, granting greater autonomy to private producers operating joint ventures or new contractual arrangements. The reform also formalizes an oil production-sharing model introduced by Maduro in recent years, aimed at attracting foreign capital despite sanctions.
Still, the exclusion of Chinese and Russian entities from the new U.S. authorization raises concerns about operational disruptions. Francisco Monaldi, director of the Latin American Energy Program at Rice University’s Baker Institute, noted that joint ventures involving companies from those countries account for roughly 22% of Venezuela’s oil output.
“If they cannot export the oil coming from these ventures, that’s a big problem,” Monaldi said, warning that PDVSA could face difficulties marketing crude tied to those projects.
However, the developments so far are pointing to one direction of a carefully calibrated strategy by the Trump administration: opening the door wider for U.S. companies to dominate Venezuelan oil trade, while keeping rival powers on the sidelines and maintaining leverage over how, and under what terms, the country’s vast energy resources return to global markets.