Days after announcing what he called “the biggest oil deal in world history,” President Trump said Sunday that Venezuelan oil will refill the depleted Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It’s still unclear how this will happen, but the claim already has two separate problems.
The first is chemistry. The reserve doesn’t normally accept oil below roughly 22° API gravity, a measure of how light or heavy crude is. Most Venezuelan output falls well under that line, extra-heavy crude that requires specialized handling and additional refining before officials will even weigh it for storage. Even oil that does qualify often needs blending with existing stocks first, and federal officials can simply decline crude that doesn’t meet the reserve’s standards.
Read: US Government Says They’ve Signed A 65 Billion Barrel Venezuela Oil Deal
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The second is that the oil isn’t there yet. The deal grants the US a stake in 65 billion barrels of Venezuela’s reserves, resources that remain underground and largely undeveloped. Getting Venezuelan crude into US storage means drilling new wells, fixing existing equipment, and rebuilding both pipelines and export terminals, then establishing a transport chain that reaches all the way to the Gulf Coast, work that plausibly takes years rather than matching the “very shortly” timeline Trump described.
Venezuela’s constitution also gives the state control of petroleum resources, and how much authority an interim government Venezuela’s Supreme Court installed after Nicolás Maduro’s capture has to sign away access to it remains legally unsettled.
He called the oil a “Gift from Venezuela to the People of the United States,” said the “topping out” process would begin shortly, and blamed the reserve’s condition entirely on Joe Biden.
The Biden administration drew the reserve down, authorizing a record 180-million-barrel release in 2022 to ease prices after Russia invaded Ukraine, leaving the SPR at roughly 394 million barrels when he left office in January 2025. While Trump’s administration had built it back up to around 415 million barrels by February 2026, it fell from there mainly because Trump authorized a 172-million-barrel drawdown that spring, responding to the same oil-price shock his war with Iran had triggered.
The reserve sat at just 289.7 million barrels when he posted Sunday, a 44-year low reflecting nearly a 30% drop since January, per Energy Information Administration figures.
