No, We’re Not Going to Fill Up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve with Venezuelan Oil

The first week of Joe Biden’s term in 2021, the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve had 638 million barrels of oil. The first week of President Trump’s second term in 2025, the SPR had 396 million barrels of oil.

As of August 21, it has 289 million barrels of oil. This is the lowest the reserve has been since 1982.

In 2025 the United States consumed an average of about 20.6 million barrels of petroleum per day.

Sunday morning, President Trump posted on Truth Social:

One of the things I am going to do with the Venezuelan Oil is fill up the Strategic National Reserves which, because of Sleepy Joe Biden, has been virtually emptied. The “topping out” process will begin very shortly, and is a Gift from Venezuela to the People of the United States. Thank you! President DONALD J. TRUMP

The “topping out process” will not begin “very shortly,” for a variety of reasons.

For starters, while Venezuela has oodles of proven reserves, the country’s poorly managed and aging extraction equipment mean it produces significantly less oil than you might expect. From the U.S. Energy Information Administration: “Venezuela had the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves in 2023 with approximately 303 billion barrels accounting for approximately 17 percent of global reserves. Despite the sizeable reserves, Venezuela produced 0.8 percent of total global crude oil in 2023.” That’s not 8 percent, that’s eight-tenths of 1 percent.

The good news is that in the past year, there’s been a bit of improvement on this front: “Venezuela pumped just over one million barrels per day during June 2026. This represents an impressive 17.6 percent increase over 2025, although it is less than half of the 2.1 million barrels lifted for the same month a decade earlier.” Any increase in production is welcome news for Venezuelans and global oil markets, but Venezuela’s production each day is still just about 5 percent of U.S. demand each day.

To really get Venezuelan production up to where it could be, it’s going to require a huge investment in newer, better equipment and infrastructure. Venezuela needs more than $100 billion in oil sector investment to restore production to levels seen 20 years ago, according to Francisco Monaldi, director of the Latin American Energy Program at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. Monaldi points out that oil companies aren’t going to want to make expensive investments in oil infrastructure in Venezuela until they’re certain the country will respect the rule of law and property rights. Venezuela ranked 180th out of 182 countries in corruption for the year 2025. (South Sudan and Somalia tied for first.)

Maybe with Nicolás Maduro gone and the U.S. exerting much higher influence than before, that will change, but if you’re a U.S. or other country’s oil company, how certain are you that some future Venezuelan government won’t nationalize all your facilities in the country? If there’s a Democratic president starting in 2029, how much will that president care about who’s controlling the oil facilities in Venezuela?

Either way, a dramatic increase in Venezuelan oil production is not coming quickly, which means that oil won’t be “topping up” America’s strategic reserves.

Then there’s the matter of how Venezuela’s oil is different from most of the oil produced in America, requiring its own separate refining equipment:

Most of Venezuela’s oil, especially from the Orinoco Belt, is classified as heavy or extra-heavy crude. In technical terms, it has a low API gravity. In practical terms, it’s thick, dense, and reluctant to flow. When it goes into a refinery, it doesn’t naturally yield a high share of the products people care about most, which are gasoline, jet fuel, and diesel. A larger portion of the barrel stays in the form of heavy residual material that must be aggressively broken down.

Venezuelan crude is also usually “sour,” which means it has a relatively high sulfur content and elevated levels of metals and other contaminants, which are far from harmless to refining mechanisms. They corrode equipment, poison catalysts, and force refineries to spend more money on hydrogen, energy, and cleanup processes to meet modern fuel and emissions standards. The result is more complexity and higher operating costs for anyone trying to run those barrels.

By contrast, much of the oil the United States produces today, especially from shale fields like the Permian Basin, is light, “sweet” crude. It flows easily, contains relatively little sulfur, and when it’s heated in a distillation column, a large share of it boils off into valuable middle and light products. That means less work is required to turn it into the fuels that actually sell.

Now, the U.S. can refine the heavier stuff; according to the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers organization, nearly 70 percent of U.S. refining capacity runs most efficiently with heavier crude oil. (Venezuela isn’t the only major foreign source of heavy crude oil; about 79 percent of Canada’s oil exports to the U.S. are heavy crude oil.)

If a lot more heavy crude oil was coming to the U.S. from Venezuela, it would make sense to expand refinery capacity designed for it. (The U.S. builds new refineries very, very rarely.) But before you do that, you need the ability to get the stuff out of the ground faster and more efficiently. And that is not going to happen “very shortly.”

This is all separate from the question of whether it’s a good idea to have the Pentagon go into business with Alejandro Betancourt, a crony of Maduro’s right-hand woman, Delcy Rodríguez.