U.S. takes a 35 percent stake in the firm given 100-year rights to 17 Venezuelan fields

The White House published a fact sheet this week that sets out how the United States intends to control a private company now holding 100-year rights to 17 Venezuelan oil fields. The Pentagon's Office of Strategic Capital receives a 35 percent stake in North American Blue Energy Partners, or NABEP, at no cost to the U.S. Treasury. The State Department can buy 20 percent of production at cost and has first refusal on the rest. Washington can veto board appointments. Most directors must be U.S. citizens. The contract sits under U.S. law and U.S. courts.

NABEP is a privately held firm led by Venezuelan businessman Alejandro Betancourt, headquartered in Barbados with offices in Venezuela. It has pledged to seek as much as $100 billion to rebuild production. The fields cover about 65 billion barrels, which the administration presents as roughly a fifth of Venezuela's OPEC-reported reserves. President Donald Trump called the package the biggest oil deal in world history after announcing it on 28 August.

Interim president Delcy Rodríguez tells a different clock and a different owner. She says Venezuela keeps sovereignty over the oil, describes a 25-year bilateral arrangement rather than a 100-year concession, and projects about $209 billion for Venezuela in a first phase, with some $19 a barrel going to the state. She hosted U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright in Caracas this week, along with executives from Chevron, Eni and GE Vernova who signed separate investment papers. Those commercial talks were months old. They were overshadowed by the Betancourt structure, which several industry figures said they had not expected.

The design creates a state-backed operator that can compete with the same U.S. producers the administration says it wants to help. Supporters argue it will move crude faster than a committee of listed companies. Critics inside the industry call it a de facto national oil company with an American veto. Either reading leaves listed firms as junior partners on acreage they had been negotiating themselves.

Venezuelan opposition politicians, including María Corina Machado, the country's most popular opposition figure in recent polling, have warned that a deal signed by Rodríguez could give Washington a reason to keep an unelected interim government in place. Machado has not promised that a future elected government would tear the contract up. She has said the sequence looks like oil first and votes later. Almost every faction in Caracas wants U.S. capital in the fields. They do not agree on who should be sitting in Miraflores when the capital arrives.

Seven months after the capture of Nicolás Maduro, the oil file is the clearest statement of what Washington wants from the new Caracas. It wants barrels, a board it can block, and a legal home in U.S. courts. Venezuela wants investment and a claim that the resource is still Venezuelan. Those two sentences only sit together if the $19-a-barrel state take arrives and the 100-year language is treated as a ceiling rather than a deed.

Production will settle the argument faster than speeches. Fields that have been starved of parts and power do not answer a fact sheet. They answer workovers, power plants and export berths. If NABEP can lift output, the 35 percent stake looks like a bargain. If it cannot, Washington will own a third of a company whose main asset is a piece of paper signed in a palace that still has an interim nameplate on the door.