Report: Billionaire Texas Oilman Inks Deal to Revamp Venezuela’s Onshore Oil Fields

LNG Energy Group, a Canada-based company that billionaire Texas businessman Rodney Lewis owns, brokered a deal with Venezuela’s state-owned PDVSA oil company to rehabilitate five of its onshore oil fields, the Associated Press (AP) reported Wednesday.

The deal was announced days after the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden reinstated oil and gas sanctions on the socialist Maduro regime. LNG states on its website that the deal was brokered on April 17, one day before the six-month sanctions relief package’s expiration date.

Biden temporarily lifted the sanctions, originally imposed in 2019 during the administration of former President Donald Trump, in October 2023 as a reward to the Maduro regime, part of a now-failed effort to entice the socialists to allow a “free and fair” presidential election in 2024.

AP reported that, as part of the deal, PDVSA awarded LNG contracts to take over the production and development of two oil fields in eastern Venezuela that currently produce some 3,000 barrels of crude oil per day. However, LNG’s website says the contract covers “five onshore fields.”

LNG stated that its deal with PDVSA was executed within the terms of the sanctions relief package, stressing that it “intends to operate in full compliance with the applicable sanctions regimes.”

The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued a license on April 17 that gave companies a 45-day time frame to wind down operations and businesses involving PDVSA, unless they hold a specific license from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, such as the one granted to California-based Chevron in November 2022, which allows Chevron to resume oil production in Venezuela and sell Venezuelan oil in U.S. markets.

While the 45-day period is set to end on May 31, 2024, OFAC informed that persons or companies may apply for authorization licenses, which will be evaluated on a “case by case” basis. That loophole, AP stated, “could attract investment to a country sitting atop the world’s largest petroleum reserves at a time of growing concerns about energy supplies in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”

“This will be a test of U.S. sanctions whether they get a license or not,” Francisco Monaldi, an expert on Latin American energy policy at Rice University’s Baker Institute, told AP.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken was the chief Biden administration official promoting the prospect of having socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro permit a “free and fair” presidential election in Venezuela. Maduro has clung to power over the past six years after holding a highly fraudulent election in May 2018 in which only handpicked rivals were allowed to compete against him.

Biden lifted the now-reinstated oil and gas sanctions in October at the end of a round of negotiations held in Barbados between the Maduro regime and opposition representatives. The agreements signed there bound the Maduro regime to a series of vague promises that called for a “free and fair” election in 2024. Maduro, despite reaping profits and establishing new business ventures with other countries thanks to Biden’s sanction relief package, failed to keep his word and “replaced” the now-dead electoral agreement with a tailor-made one that calls for a sham election on July 28.

Maduro banned the opposition’s frontrunner candidate, María Corina Machado, from running for public office generally and will not allow her on the sham election ballot. The socialist-led opposition has since abandoned Machado despite her overwhelming popularity and begun to rally around Edmundo González Urrutia, a little-known 74-year-old former ambassador and the only opposition candidate successfully allowed to register as a candidate. González Urrutia had originally registered his candidacy as a “placeholder” under the Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD) card.

At press time, González Urrutia is slated to run against Maduro and a handful of regime-approved “opposition” rivals and collaborationists in the sham July election.

Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.