Trump’s Venezuela Oil Revival Plan Is a $100 Billion Gamble (1)

Realizing President Donald Trump’s plan for a US-led revival of Venezuela’s beleaguered oil industry could be a years-long and challenging process costing upwards of $100 billion.

Years of corruption, underinvestment, fires and thefts have left the nation’s crude infrastructure in tatters. Rebuilding it enough to lift Venezuela’s output back to its peak levels of the 1970s would require companies to invest about $10 billion per year over the next decade, said Francisco Monaldi, director of Latin American energy policy at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

That’s equivalent to more than a third of what Exxon Mobil ...