What's the future for Venezuelan oil?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 5 January 2026
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After American forces arrested and removed the leader of Venezuela, Rahul Tandon looks at what the future might hold for the world's largest oil reserve, and what can we learn from the country's past.
Many US companies were forced out of Venezuela when the oil industry was nationalised in the 1970s. The type of oil found there is also hard to reach and complicated to refine.
We look at its difficult history, where the oil it produces now goes to, and whether US oil companies will want to spend the tens of billions of dollars it is thought will be needed to fix Venezuela's oil infrastructure.
If you'd like to get in touch with the programme, our email address is businessdaily@bbc.co.uk
Presenter: Rahul Tandon Reporter: Gideon Long Producer: Justin Bones
(Picture: A man wearing a face mask walks past a mural depicting an oil pump and the Venezuelan flag in a street of Caracas, on 26 May, 2022. Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:06.3 | Hello, this is Business Daily on the BBC World Service with me, Rahult Tandon. |
| 0:11.4 | And on this special edition, we're looking at the state of the Venezuelan economy following the removal of its president, Nicholas Maduro. |
| 0:20.5 | I remember being in Venezuela and seeing people carrying backpacks of cash around, |
| 0:24.3 | and you had to just to buy a coffee or a meal in a restaurant. |
| 0:27.2 | But could there be better days ahead? |
| 0:29.6 | Donald Trump suddenly thinks so. |
| 0:31.3 | We're going to have our very large United States oil companies, |
| 0:36.4 | the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars. |
| 0:40.7 | We're asking what's the future for the world's largest oil reserves. |
| 0:44.7 | That's all coming up here on Business Daily. |
| 0:47.6 | I'm sure that like me, many of you have over the weekend, been closely following what has been happening in Venezuela. It's been |
| 0:55.7 | extraordinary. A little before 2 a.m. local time on Saturday, Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, |
| 1:02.6 | came under aerial assault. By daylight, those explosions were over. The bombers had departed, |
| 1:10.3 | and the Venezuelan President Nicolas Madura |
| 1:13.0 | and his wife, Cila Flores, |
| 1:15.6 | had been captured and were on their way to the U.S. |
| 1:18.8 | Shortly after that, the U.S. President Donald Trump had this to say. |
| 1:23.1 | We're going to run the country until such time |
| 1:25.5 | as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition. |
| 1:31.0 | So we don't want to be involved with having somebody else get in |
| 1:36.2 | and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years. |
... |
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