Chevron, ONGC and Eni Near Final Venezuela Oil Contracts as Hunt Oil, SLB Sign First Deals Since 2007

Since Delcy Rodríguez laid out the 25-year, 17-oilfield terms of the U.S.-Venezuela sovereign oil pact last week, a separate track of company-level contracts has been moving toward the finish line.

Chevron, GE Vernova, India's ONGC, Italy's Eni and Colombia's GeoPark are on track to sign final agreements in Venezuela, according to four sources close to the preparations cited by Reuters and carried by OilPrice.com and BOE Report. The deals could be inked as early as this week, the sources said.

These are distinct from the massive Washington-Caracas agreement Trump announced on August 29, which gives the U.S. a stake in 17 oilfields holding roughly 64 to 65 billion barrels of proven reserves, about a fifth of Venezuela's total crude reserves. The company-level pacts cover individual energy projects negotiated over months, separate from the sovereign framework Rodríguez detailed over the weekend.

Eni told Reuters it is working with its Venezuelan counterparts and other authorities to "support the revitalization of the country's energy sector." Chevron, GE Vernova, ONGC and GeoPark did not immediately respond to requests for comment, according to BOE Report.

Deals Already Signed in Houston

While those five companies wait on final signatures, two American firms have already closed contracts. Dallas-based Hunt Oil Company signed an agreement to expand Venezuela's oil and gas production, and Houston-based SLB, formerly Schlumberger, signed a deal for oil exploration, according to NPR's reporting from Houston Public Media energy reporter Natalie Weber.

Both contracts were signed this week while Venezuelan energy officials were in Houston for an industry conference, where Venezuela's oil minister, Paula Henao, announced the Hunt Oil agreement on state media, NPR reported. Weber said the country has changed its laws to make foreign investment easier but that neither company has disclosed how much either deal is worth.

Francisco Monaldi, director of Rice University's Latin America Energy Program, told NPR these are among the first major agreements between U.S. oil companies and Venezuela since Caracas nationalized foreign-held oil fields in 2007, and said the contracts "could open up a new wave of investment." James Chester, CEO of Energy Capital & Power, which organized the Houston conference, noted the significance of Venezuelan officials traveling to Texas rather than waiting for companies to come to Caracas.

Weber also pointed to a practical driver behind Venezuela's urgency: the country needs billions of dollars to rebuild after a devastating June earthquake that killed thousands of people, and the new contracts arrive as that rebuilding effort competes for scarce government revenue.

The Legitimacy Question

A fair concern raised by skeptics of the broader arrangement is whether a government installed after the U.S. military captured former leader Nicolás Maduro on narco-terrorism and cocaine trafficking charges has the standing to bind Venezuela to a 25-year resource agreement and a wave of individual company contracts. Rodríguez, described in reporting as Venezuela's acting or interim president, is not an elected head of state chosen in a contested national vote since Maduro's removal.

Rodríguez has pushed back on that framing directly. She has said Venezuela retains "ownership of and sovereignty" over its natural resources and that the country is "leveraging capital, technology and operational expertise" rather than surrendering control, according to Reuters reporting carried by the Daily Signal. She has also said the deal could generate roughly $209 billion in state revenue at a $65-per-barrel benchmark, with about $19 of each barrel produced flowing directly to Venezuela's government.

None of the sourcing here establishes fraud, coercion, or an illegitimate signing process in the company-level deals themselves. What remains genuinely unresolved is financial: neither Hunt Oil nor SLB has disclosed contract values, and the terms Chevron, GE Vernova, ONGC, Eni and GeoPark are expected to sign this week have not been made public either.

What Comes Next

The next concrete marker is whether Chevron, ONGC, Eni, GE Vernova and GeoPark actually finalize signatures this week, as the sources cited by Reuters expect. If they do, that would mark at least seven companies from four countries with active Venezuelan contracts inside a single week, on top of the sovereign 65-billion-barrel framework already announced. Whether any of these agreements move the needle on U.S. gasoline prices, which AAA put at $4.07 a gallon on August 30 according to the Epoch Times, will depend on how quickly the promised production increase to 1.5 million barrels per day materializes, a target Rodríguez herself called only an initial goal.