The relationship between California and Venezuela goes back more than a century with Chevron

As a stunned world considers the US government’s sudden intervention in Venezuela – debating its legality, speculating on the ultimate winners and losers – a California-based company with deep ties to the Golden State could be among the biggest beneficiaries.

Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world. Chevron, an international petroleum conglomerate with a major refinery in El Segundo and headquartered, until recently, in San Ramon, is the only foreign oil company that has continued to operate there during the decades of transition.

Other major oil companies, including ConocoPhillips and Exxon Mobil, pulled out of Venezuela in 2007 when then-President Hugo Chávez demanded that they cede majority ownership of their operations to the country’s state-controlled oil company, PDVSA.

But Chevron remained, playing the “long game,” according to industry analysts, hoping to one day reap the big returns on the investments the company began making there nearly a century ago.

It looks like that bet may pay off in the end.

In his press conference on Saturday, after US Special Forces kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife in Caracas and brought them back to face drug trafficking charges in New York, President Trump said the US will “run” Venezuela and open up more large oil reserves to US corporations.

“We’re going to have our biggest oil companies in America, the biggest in the world, come in, spend billions of dollars, fix the broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country,” Trump said during a news conference on Saturday.

While oil industry analysts are angry at the prospect, warning that it could take years to start reaping big profits given Venezuela’s long-neglected, dilapidated infrastructure, and everyday Venezuelans worried about money flowing out of the country and into the pockets of American investors, there is one group that can be forgiven for jumping with unreserved joy: Chevron has been making decisions all these years in Venezuela.

But the company’s official response to the dramatic turn of events was poker-faced.

“Chevron remains focused on the safety and well-being of our employees, and the integrity of our assets,” spokesman Bill Turenne wrote to The Times on Sunday, the same statement the company sent to news outlets over the weekend.. “We continue to operate in full compliance with all relevant laws and regulations.”

Turenne did not respond to questions about potential financial rewards for the company stemming from this weekend’s US military action.

Chevron, a direct descendant of a small oil company founded in Southern California in the 1870s, has grown into a $300 billion global corporation. The company was headquartered in San Ramon, just outside of San Francisco, until management announced in August 2024 that they were fleeing more expensive California to Houston.

Texas’ relatively low taxes and easy regulation have been an indicator for many California companies, and many of Chevron’s competitors are based there.

Chevron began exploring in Venezuela in the early 1920s, according to the company’s website, and ramped up operations after discovering the large Boscan oil field in the 1940s. Over the past decades, it has grown to become Venezuela’s largest foreign investor.

The company continued for decades as the Venezuelan government slowly moved to the left; began nationalizing the oil industry by creating a state-owned petroleum company in 1976, then sought majority ownership of foreign oil assets in 2007 under Chávez.

Venezuela has the world’s largest proven reserves of crude oil – meaning they are safe to tap – at about 303 billion barrels, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

But even with those huge reserves, Venezuela produced less than 1% of the world’s crude oil. Production has fallen slightly from 3.5 million barrels a day pumped in 1999 to just over 1 million a day now.

Currently, Chevron’s operations in Venezuela employ approximately 3,000 people and produce between 250,000 and 300,000 barrels of oil per day, according to published reports.

That’s less than 10% of the estimated 3 million barrels the company produces from assets spread around the world, from the Gulf of Mexico to Kazakhstan and Australia.

But some analysts are optimistic that Venezuela could double or triple its current output relatively quickly — which could lead to Chevron’s collapse.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.