Shortly after launching a dramatic raid in which U.S. forces abducted Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro on Saturday, President Donald Trump justified the action with a promise to revive Venezuela’s moribund oil industry. The country has by far the largest claimed reserves of crude oil in the world, accounting for almost a fifth of the world’s remaining known crude oil, but its production has plummeted under Maduro, who has ruled the country since 2013.

“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,” Trump said during a press conference at Mar-a-Lago in which he announced Maduro’s capture.

This intervention comes at a pivotal movement for the global oil industry, which continues to stare down the prospect of a broad transition to renewable energy. For this reason, it’s not obvious that future markets can justify a surge of investment in Venezuela. On one hand, the country’s extra-heavy crude oil is perfect for diesel and jet fuel, which are helpful in hard-to-decarbonize industries. This makes it less threatened by the meteoric rise of electric vehicles displacing gasoline-powered cars. On the other hand, the world is already experiencing an overall glut of oil, and analysts expect demand to peak in the next decade. While there are buyers for additional oil that could be pumped in Venezuela — some of them on the U.S. Gulf Coast — experts say a total revival on the order that Trump is promising may not be in the cards.

“There’s a guaranteed market for it, but a market that has its limitations in size,” said Antoine Halff, the founder of the climate and data analysis firm Kayrros and a non-resident fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

As electric vehicles and renewable energy continue to expand, the world appears to be approaching a peak in oil demand. While the exact timing of that peak is disputed — it could happen within four years or in more than 15 years — almost all analysts agree that it is coming. At that point, there may no longer be sufficient demand to keep exploiting new oil fields, no matter how large. And given that it will take many years just to update the infrastructure that will allow for increased oil production in Venezuela in the first place, investors may decide that the juice is not worth the squeeze.

Then there’s the matter of predicting future prices in a notoriously volatile industry. Oil companies only make a profit when global oil prices stay above a certain level. For the American companies that produce oil from Texas shale, for example, that number is around $60 a barrel, which is close to the current benchmark price. For Saudi Arabia, it’s closer to $90 a barrel, because oil revenues back almost all the kingdom’s government spending. In the newest oil fields, such as those offshore of Guyana, it’s as low as $30. There are already concerns that an oversupply of oil worldwide could send prices tumbling over the next year, making new fields less palatable to investors. If demand plateaus, a surge of Venezuelan crude would push prices even further down. Since Venezuela is a member of OPEC, it would have to coordinate production along with Saudi and other major producers, who would likely prevent Venezuela from flooding the market.

Even so, there will likely be long-term demand for the specific kind of oil that Venezuela produces. That’s because any energy transition will not happen at equal speed across all parts of the transportation sector. The expansion of electric vehicles will first replace passenger cars and mopeds, which rely on lighter oil from fields like those of the Texas shale. Larger vehicles like airplanes and heavy-duty trucks are harder to replace — they need more power than EV batteries can feasibly provide at present — and they rely on heavy oil like Venezuela’s. A report from the oil trading firm Vitol found that “the initial pace of decline [for diesel] is expected to be slow compared to gasoline, but begins to gather pace from 2035 onwards.” Few other countries boast the same kind of extra-heavy reserves that Venezuela has, and those that do, like Canada, have much higher production costs.

“These are the hard-to-abate segments,” said Halff. “It’s the part of oil demand that looks like it’s not going to shrink quickly. 

Venezuela pumped more than 3 million barrels of oil per day at the turn of the century, but production totals have plummeted since then. After the government of Hugo Chávez nationalized major oil infrastructure in 2007, the United States imposed financial sanctions that forced Venezuela to sell its oil at steep discounts. Under the Maduro government, the state-owned oil company racked up debts and saw an exodus of skilled workers. Pumps and pipelines decayed out of service, storage tanks collapsed, and production bottomed out at around 500,000 barrels per day during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

President Trump has promised that his aggressive raid on Venezuela will lead to a revival of this industry, and he has reportedly urged American oil producers to aid him in the effort. In remarks following the Maduro raid, he promised that American companies would return to Venezuela and help export oil to other countries. Given how inefficient the state-run oil sector has become, analysts believe it would be easy to restore some production in the short term with outside investment and sanctions relief.

“Our assumption is that there are a lot of wells that just need a workover,” said Adrian Lara, the lead analyst for the Latin American oil industry at the research firm Wood Mackenzie, in a brief published last month before Maduro’s capture. “You can boost production through opex [operational expenditure], without needing much new capex [capital expenditure]” — in other words, a tune-up rather than a full surge of new investment.

In the short term, there is ample demand. The oil in the country’s vast Orinoco Belt is very heavy and viscous, like molasses, in contrast to U.S. shale oil which is about as thin as vinegar. This makes it more expensive and more carbon-intensive to produce, but also makes it well-suited for conversion into diesel fuel in trucks, and for other uses like asphalt. There are several refineries along the U.S. Gulf Coast that were built to process this kind of heavy crude, and these refineries are operating below capacity. Right now, Venezuela exports most of its oil to China, which would also likely purchase more for its own refineries. An industry expert who spoke to the Wall Street Journal said access to those reserves could be a “game changer” in terms of increasing Gulf Coast refiners’ profits.

“Right now there’s plenty of appetite for heavy crude globally,” said Robert Auers, a refined fuels market analyst at the energy consultancy RBN Energy. “Even if Venezuelan production were to come back real strong, the global market could easily absorb that.”

But a grand revival like the one Trump has promised would be a much taller order, given that it would take decades to unfold. The energy analysis firm Rystad Energy projects that a return to pre-Maduro levels would require an investment of $110 billion, and these investments would not bear fruit for a decade or more. Even Chevron, the only American oil producer that operates in the country, would need to invest an estimated $7 billion in order to add another 500,000 barrels, according to a former executive who spoke with The New York Times. 

The climate pollution stemming from this crude might also play a factor in its market appeal. Right now, the heavy oil extraction in the Orinoco Belt is some of the most carbon-intensive in the world, in part because enormous amounts of methane are flared during the process. As governments continue to pursue Paris Agreement targets, however fitfully, they might shy away from such fields wherever possible and instead import lower-carbon barrels. (The European Union has already committed to do this.) Many experts believe that oil majors will hesitate before taking the plunge on a resource that is far tougher to handle than the crude in U.S. shale fields or the Middle East.

That’s all in addition to the political uncertainty that has followed Trump’s attempt to depose Maduro. It remains unclear what shape the new government of Venezuela will take. Given that other producers like Exxon lost billions of dollars when the Chávez government nationalized their assets, it’s far from obvious that these oil companies would want to invest under continued political instability. Past U.S. interventions have demonstrated similar dynamics: Oil production in Libya has still not recovered since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, and it took almost a decade for Iraqi oil production to rebound after the U.S. invaded in 2003.

“I do not believe in a significant increase in the short term,” said Rudolf Elias, chair of the supervisory board of Staatsolie, the state oil company of Suriname, which is pursuing an offshore oil project in the waters east of Venezuela. “It will take years before the industry is revived … then it is dirty oil, and heavy, so it will not be first in the row.”