President Trump says the U.S. government could subsidize any effort by American companies to rebuild Venezuela's oil infrastructure, something he told NBC News could take as little as 18 months.

It comes as multiple outlets report the White House plans to meet with top U.S. oil executive soon.

The president has made no secret that a major goal of this weekend's operation was to

pry open Venezuela's vast oil reserves for foreign investment.

We're going to have our very large United States oil companies the biggest anywhere in the world.

Go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure,

and start making money for the country.

Despite sitting on more crude than any country on Earth, Venezuela produces just 1% of the world's supply.

And its total output has dropped some 70% since the late 1990s,

a result in part of crippling U.S. sanctions and internal dysfunction.

Right now, just one American oil company Chevron operates in the country under a special license

that allows limited production despite U.S. sanctions.

Venezuela first nationalized its oil industry

in the 1970s and further consolidated control under then President Hugo Chavez in the mid-2000s,

when it forced international oil companies to transfer majority control of their operations to the

state-owned oil company. To help us understand the dynamics at play

and what could come next, we're joined now by Francisco Manali, Professor and Director of the Latin

American Energy Program at Rice University. Thanks for being with us. Thank you. So President Trump is

pushing this idea of the U.S. reimbursing American oil companies for expenses in Venezuela,

and he says oil operations could be up and running in 18 months. Is that the case?

Well, I don't think that it's clear exactly what he means. But, you know, Venezuela would require

about $100 billion of investment to go back to the

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