Why boosting production of Venezuela’s ‘very dense, very sloppy’ oil could harm the environment

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — Environmental experts warn that U.S. efforts to revamp and increase Venezuela’s vast oil reserves could compound decades of ecological damage and increase pollution linked to global warming in a country already grappling with the legacy of a long-declining oil industry.

The warnings come as Washington has stepped up pressure on Venezuela following the capture of former President Nicolás Maduro last weekend. Since then, the United States has taken steps to assert its control over Venezuelan oil exports, the country’s main source of revenue, by seizing tankers it says were transporting crude in violation of U.S. sanctions and signaling its intention to redirect Venezuelan oil to global markets under U.S. oversight.

The Trump administration has announced plans to sell between 30 and 50 million barrels of Venezuelan crude worldwide, without specifying a timetable. The profits would be held in U.S.-controlled accounts, which the administration said would benefit both Venezuelans and Americans.

Industry analysts warn that significantly expanding Venezuelan oil production would require years of investment and tens of billions of dollars to repair crumbling infrastructure, raising questions about how quickly — or if — Trump’s plans could realistically be realized.

“You have storage facilities that are literally sinking into the ground, broken wellheads and degraded infrastructure across the board,” said Paasha Mahdavi, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies energy governance and political economy.

Venezuela’s oil reserves are said to be the largest in the world, at around 300 billion barrels. The country, which stretches from the Caribbean coast to the northern Andes, is already highly exposed to oil pollution and ranks among tropical countries with the fastest rates of deforestation, according to Global Forest Watch, an online monitoring platform hosted by the World Resources Institute. It produces heavy crude which emits far more pollution than most other forms of oil. That’s because mining and refining requires more energy, which often involves burning natural gas, primarily methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that warms the planet.

Reviving Venezuela’s oil industry would worsen environmental damage in a country already plagued by oil spills, gas leaks and dilapidated infrastructure, with higher production likely to increase climate emissions and the risks of spills into fragile ecosystems, several experts have warned.

The Venezuelan Observatory of Political Ecology, an environmental watchdog, documented nearly 200 oil spills between 2016 and 2021, which largely went unreported by authorities. Satellite data from Global Forest Watch, an online forest monitoring platform hosted by the World Resources Institute, shows that Venezuela has lost about 2.6 million hectares of forest cover – about the size of the US state of Vermont – over the past two decades, largely due to agriculture, mining and fires, although oil activity has contributed to forest loss in some producing regions.

According to a 2025 report from the International Energy Agency, methane emissions intensity, or the ratio of methane released to natural gas produced, was well above the norm in Venezuela’s oil and gas operations, with estimates showing upstream methane emissions about six times higher than the global average. Flaring intensity, or the volume of natural gas burned to produce oil, was about 10 times higher than typical global levels.

The White House referred questions from The Associated Press to the Energy Department, which in a statement said the U.S. oil and gas companies that would revamp Venezuela’s oil industry had “the highest environmental standards.”

“As U.S. investment in Venezuela increases, you can expect environmental conditions to improve,” the statement said.

New oil infrastructure is needed

Venezuelan crude, dense and sticky, is high in sulfur, making it harder to extract and refine than other oils, such as the lighter oil produced from U.S. shale fields, said Diego Rivera Rivota, a senior research associate at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

“It’s very dense, very sloppy, very hard. And it’s also very acidic,” Rivota said. “What that means in practical terms is that it requires, compared to other types of oil resources, greater infrastructure, greater energy consumption – it’s much more energy intensive – and therefore also much more carbon intensive.”

Still, many U.S. refineries were designed decades ago to process this type of oil, making Venezuelan crude a good choice despite its higher processing requirements.

Even a modest increase in Venezuelan oil production could have climate consequences across entire countries, said Mahdavi, of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Mahdavi said increasing production by about 1 million barrels per day — a level often cited as a short-term goal — would add about 360 million tons of carbon dioxide per year to output. Increasing production further, to about 1.5 million barrels per day, could drive annual emissions to about 550 million tons, he said, which would be comparable to the emissions of about half of all gasoline-powered vehicles in the United States.

“It’s just one aspect of production,” Mahdavi told AP, noting that far greater emissions are generated when the oil is ultimately burned by consumers.

Patrick Galey of Global Witness, a nonprofit, said Venezuela’s oil system is among the most poorly maintained in the world after years of underinvestment, with aging pipelines, storage facilities and widespread gas flaring that increase the risk of methane spills and leaks. He said any rapid move to increase production risks prioritizing production over pollution control, worsening climate and environmental damage.

Kevin Book, research director at ClearView Energy Partners, said efforts could be made to make Venezuelan oil production more efficient, both economically and environmentally, with a significant amount of investment.

“The new investment will leverage the latest technologies in methane capture and emissions management, not only because of environmental goals, but also because there is a valuable resource to capture and sell,” Book said. “And so for that reason, there’s actually a relative potential for environmental benefits compared to the status quo, if you start from the assumption that demand for oil was going to increase anyway.”

In recent public statements, U.S. officials have focused on controlling oil sales, revenues and infrastructure repair, without mentioning environmental safeguards or climate impacts. President Trump, in both his first and second terms, repeatedly rejected the scientific consensus on climate change and rolled back environmental and clean energy policies.

Impacts on an already fragile environment

In Caracas, Antonio de Lisio, an environmental professor and researcher at the Central University of Venezuela, said oil exploitation in the country has long gone hand in hand with environmental damage, leaving behind decades-old pollution that has never been fully resolved.

He said Venezuela’s heavy oil reserves lie in fragile plains crisscrossed by slow-moving rivers, geography that can amplify the effects of spills.

“Any oil spill has the potential to get worse because these are not fast-flowing rivers, but slow-flowing waters,” de Lisio said, referring to morichales, palm wetlands common in eastern Venezuela, where contamination can persist for long periods of time.

He said energy-intensive processing plants that use heat, chemicals and large amounts of water to make heavy crude exportable pose additional environmental risks, particularly in fragile river systems.

Environmental damage has persisted even as oil production has declined, he said, singling out Lake Maracaibo — a shallow lake in western Venezuela drilled for oil for more than a century — as one of the most oil-polluted ecosystems in the world. He added that spills and contamination have also affected other regions, including areas near the Paraguana refinery complex and protected coastal parks such as Morrocoy, where pollution has devastated marine life and coral reefs.

The true environmental and social costs of Venezuelan oil have never been fully calculated, de Lisio said.

“If these costs were fully taken into account, we would see that continuing to produce oil is not the best deal for Venezuela.”

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Associated Press writer Alexa St. John contributed from Detroit.

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