It was one of the most eye-opening and fascinating business trips in my 30-year career: the opportunity to travel to Venezuela to witness firsthand the signing of oil deals between the government in Caracas and Venezuelan and Western oil companies.
CNBC was one of just a handful of news organizations allowed to travel to Caracas with the U.S. secretary of energy.
The trip was barely 24 hours long and was tightly scheduled. Venezuela is not a country where the American media is just going to wander around. It is one of the poorest countries in the world, and that was obvious the moment we landed. The airport was still shut down due to the effects of a terrible earthquake that hit back in June. More on that in a minute. We were one of the only planes to land at Simón Bolívar International Airport and took a 20-minute bus ride downtown.
You could see the remains of wealth the country and its people once had. Many of the buildings downtown and in the business district appear to have been built in the 1980s or 1990s, when the country had more than its share of oil and energy riches. Venezuela oil production peaked out in 1997 at about 3.5 million barrels per day. Then strongman dictator Hugo Chavez took over and, between him and jailed president Nicolas Maduro, they succeeded in stripping the proud nation of most of that money. Oil production collapsed to under 1 million barrels per day in much of 2025. It's only recently gone back above 1 million barrels a day. While many Russian and Chinese firms got richer, the Venezuelan people got poorer.
Enter the United States and the agreements it signed last week.