Trump hails Venezuelan oil inflow as US seizures at sea underline new energy strategy

Donald Trump used his State of the Union address to present a dramatic shift in Washington’s relationship with Venezuela as an energy success story, announcing that the United States had received “more than 80 million barrels of oil” from what he called a “new friend and partner” just hours after the Pentagon revealed the capture of another tanker linked to the South American country.

“We just received from our new friend and partner, Venezuela, more than 80 million barrels of oil,” Trump said, pairing the claim with a broader celebration of domestic output. “American oil production is up by more than 600,000 barrels a day,” he added, repeating his campaign pledge to “drill, baby, drill.”

The timing connected two strands of the administration’s policy: the push to expand US fossil fuel production at home and the effort to reshape Venezuela’s oil sector following the January operation in Caracas in which US special forces abducted President Nicolas Maduro. Maduro had previously warned that Washington’s hostility towards his government was a pretext for gaining control over the country’s vast reserves.

Since that raid, the White House has moved to open Venezuela’s energy industry to US companies, hosting executives from Chevron, Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips for talks in early January on the future of oil production there.

The military dimension of that strategy was visible earlier on Tuesday, when the Pentagon said US forces had boarded and seized a third tanker in the Indian Ocean.

“Three boats ran and now all three have been captured,” the Department of Defense wrote on social media, releasing footage that showed armed troops descending from helicopters onto a vessel it said had been tracked “from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean.”

The ship, identified as the Bertha, was carrying 1.9 million barrels of Merey 16 crude, according to Samir Madani of TankerTrackers.com. He told the Associated Press that the vessel was one of 16 tankers that left the Venezuelan coast after Maduro’s removal on January 3.

Shipping records illustrate the opaque routes such cargoes often take. The Bertha had been flagged to the Cook Islands when it was sanctioned over links to Iran, but more recently appeared under the flag of Curaçao and was managed by a company in China, according to the Equasis maritime database. The Pentagon did not specify the ship’s point of origin.

The seizures and the inflow of oil come as the administration accelerates extraction elsewhere, including in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, reinforcing a fossil-fuel-first energy policy at a time when several Caribbean states are calling for a faster transition to renewables as they confront stronger tropical storms linked to climate change.