Venezuela's state-owned oil firm PdV is reviewing 26 joint ventures granted from 2024-2025 to align them with changes to the hydrocarbons law or cancel them after the US has demanded reforms for investors.
Now president Rodriguez began implementing new types of joint ventures, including some known as productive participation agreements (CPPs), after she took on the role of oil minister in October 2024 as part of her vice presidency.
The arrangements could be retrofitted to match provisions under the recently modified hydrocarbons law, one PdV source told Argus, but more likely they may be cancelled.
The 26 oil contracts granted after the ouster and arrest of former oil minister Pedro Tellechea in October 2024 and before the US seized former Venezuela leader Nicolas Maduro on 3 January are being reviewed, the PdV source said. Of those, 13 are CPPs.
The PdV source said the US is pressuring Rodriguez to end those contracts since most of the other partners are non-US or little-known entities.
"I think they will all be suspended," the source said. "What the Americans have told us is [any deals] need to be authorized by us."
Rodriguez and Maduro granted the 26 deals in the two years but provided few public details. Even after Maduro was arrested on 3 January, Rodriguez still described the CPPs as a way forward to increase Venezuelan oil production. But once the law was modified the government and its partners were granted six months to adopt the contracts to the new law or cancel them.
Sources say the arrangements were doomed to fail, since they were laboring from the beginning under the weight of US sanctions that are only now beginning to be lifted.
"She granted two dozen contracts, but only five of those ... are in actual production", a former Venezuelan oil minister said. "Eliminating or retooling those contracts will have zero impact on production."
Retooling those agreement or granting new ones may instead help to increase Venezuela's production from its plateau of about 1mn b/d in recent months.
