President Donald Trump’s boast that cheaper gas is just around the corner after his energy deal with Venezuela didn’t last long at all.
According to a report from The Washington Post, energy industry analysts and experts in oil extraction are rolling their eyes at the president’s claim that “THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY” would “substantially lower Gas Prices for all Americans.”
That may be true in five years at best, experts fired back.
Not for at least a couple of years, if ever, many in the industry told the Washington Post — certainly not before voters cast ballots in the fall midterms, and probably not before Trump leaves office. That’s because the billions of barrels of reserves the U.S. is seeking access to through the deal are “notoriously difficult to extract.”
“Everyone cheering the Venezuela deal thinks a flood of cheap oil is about to hit and pull gas prices down. It isn’t,” Tracy Shuchart, senior economist at NinjaTrader, wrote on X. “The barrels that could actually move a U.S. pump price are 5 to 15 years out.”
Mark Finley, a fellow in energy and global oil at Rice University’s Baker Institute, told the Post the “ramp-up” will be slow at best.
“The United States grew its oil production by 1.5 million barrels per day in just the last couple of years. The Venezuelans are talking about it taking many times longer there,” he explained. “These barrels are likely to be slow in coming. We are not talking about a fast ramp-up.”
An oil industry official with deep Venezuela ties, granted anonymity to speak candidly, was blunter still.
“There are huge economic challenges that have to be overcome to make this real. They need to induce an Exxon or some other big oil company to say we want to join in developing these fields,” they explained. “Most of these fields have been there and nobody had been saying they want to run over there to develop them. It is economically not feasible to do it.”
“Right now this feels like pie in the sky,” they predicted.
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