Trump's Oil Ambitions and Venezuela Conundrum

Trump's Oil Ambitions and Venezuela Conundrum (Full Transcript)

Exploration of Trump's oil obsession, his venture into Venezuela, and the challenges facing American oil companies amid low prices and oversupply.

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[00:00:00] Speaker 1: They took our oil away from us, they took the infrastructure away, and all that infrastructure's rotted and decayed, and the oil companies are going to go in and rebuild it.

[00:00:11] Speaker 2: Trump has been obsessed with oil for a long time. Think Greenland, making Canada the 51st state, attacking OPEC countries, drill baby drill.

[00:00:20] Speaker 1: Drill, drill, drill, drill baby drill.

[00:00:23] Speaker 2: All of that has to do with oil, and so Trump is really committed to that, so committed that they went into Venezuela and captured the president of the country. It was extraordinary, and so now Trump has to make good on this promise. Can he do that is an active question. There's two problems with what Trump is saying. The first is that oil is really cheap. It's under $60 a barrel right now, which basically makes it unprofitable for American oil companies to go in and spend the tens of billions of dollars that they would need to rebuild Venezuela's infrastructure. The other thing is that oil is historically oversupplied right now. There is just so much oil, so much in fact, that American oil companies don't even want to drill in the United States, let alone take on the risk to go into Venezuela. So is Trump right? Can we go into Venezuela and just take all that oil back that was taken from previous regimes? Maybe. It's going to be a long time before any of that happens.