Nearly a week after President Trump called it "the biggest oil deal in world history," the two governments behind it still haven't agreed on how long their new arrangement actually runs. The White House filled in several missing pieces on Monday, naming the private company that will operate on Washington's behalf and disclosing terms it had kept quiet since Friday's announcement. What didn't get resolved is the question that's been circulating through Doral since the weekend: is this a 25-year deal, or a 100-year one? And there's a second question worth asking now too, given who's actually running that private company.
What's actually been signed
Trump announced the agreement Friday night on social media, crediting Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for reaching terms with interim President Delcy Rodríguez covering more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan crude. The corporate structure underneath that announcement stayed hidden for days: Washington is forming a joint venture with North American Blue Energy Partners, better known as NABEP, a firm that already ranks as Venezuela's second-largest oil operator, trailing only Chevron. Under terms the administration laid out this week, the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Capital takes a 35 percent ownership stake in that new company, while the State Department locks in the right to buy a fifth of its output at production cost, a combination that analysts have pegged at roughly 55 percent of the venture's overall economics flowing back to the United States. Hegseth and Rubio signed for Washington's side, and NABEP has pledged $100 billion toward new drilling and infrastructure. Officials say the arrangement won't cost American taxpayers anything and that the U.S. holds veto power over a company board expected to be majority-American.
Who is running the company
NABEP answers to Alejandro Betancourt, a 46-year-old Venezuelan businessman who has spent much of the past decade fending off money-laundering allegations across three countries. American authorities have examined whether he helped move more than a billion dollars out of Venezuela's state oil company through a fraudulent loan scheme, and Spain's National Court revived a separate case against him in June accusing him of funneling tens of millions of dollars in bribes to state oil officials as part of a currency-fraud operation worth billions. Swiss prosecutors dropped an extradition request against him in the spring, following months of quiet outreach from senior American officials on his behalf. Betancourt has never been formally charged in any of the three countries and has consistently denied wrongdoing. In a statement issued alongside Monday's disclosures, he described Venezuela's oil sector as full of untapped promise and said the venture would benefit both nations.
The 100-year, 25-year gap
Here's where the story splits. The White House told reporters this week that Rodríguez is granting the new joint venture 100-year rights over the 17 fields involved, a figure that's shown up consistently in reporting tied to administration officials. But Rodríguez herself, addressing the country on television the night after Trump's announcement, described something else: what she called a 25-year bilateral project targeting production above 1.5 million barrels a day across those same 17 fields. She projected the arrangement could deliver roughly $209 billion to Venezuela's treasury over its lifetime, using a $65-per-barrel benchmark, with about $19 of every barrel flowing straight to the state. Neither government has released the actual contract, so nobody outside the two negotiating teams can check either number against real text.
What Venezuela's own law says
There's a legal snag that makes the 100-year figure difficult to square. Venezuela's hydrocarbons statute, rewritten this past January, limits a joint operating arrangement like this one to an initial 25 years, with room for a single extension of up to 15 more, putting a 40-year ceiling on the whole thing under most legal readings of the reform. That's the very statute Rodríguez's government cites as the legal foundation for the deal, which may explain why her own public account landed at 25 years even as Washington kept repeating a figure four times as long. Until a signed document surfaces, LT is treating the duration as an open question and reporting both numbers rather than picking a side.
Doral asks: whose deal is this?
For Doral's Venezuelan-American community, the confusion isn't just academic, and Betancourt's legal history hasn't helped matters. Florida International University politics professor Eduardo Gamarra, reacting to the rollout, described "an absolute lack of transparency" surrounding the arrangement. Foreign policy analyst Adam Ratzlaff, speaking to the same outlet, asked how a deal struck with a government that hasn't held elections squares with any eventual path to democracy, and whether Venezuela's opposition would even recognize the agreement as legitimate. Doral resident Idael Silio put it more bluntly, telling local reporters the U.S. is negotiating with "the same people" who served under Nicolás Maduro.
Gas prices, still climbing
Trump has promised the deal will eventually bring fuel costs down, but GasBuddy analyst Patrick De Haan told South Florida reporters that regional pump prices were creeping toward $3.99 ahead of Labor Day regardless, and that any relief tied to Venezuelan crude sits five to ten years out given how difficult the country's heavy oil is to refine. Nationally, the average price at the pump stayed above $4 a gallon for every day of August, according to AAA figures cited by wire reports. Asked about the timeline Monday, Trump allowed it "could be a little bit" before drivers see a difference.
Washington's partisan divide
The deal has scrambled the usual party lines. Sen. Tim Kaine argued the military operation that captured Maduro was always aimed at securing Venezuela's oil, branding the resulting arrangement "corruption at epic scale," while Sen. Chris Van Hollen said Trump had "put our service members at risk to get Venezuelan oil for his billionaire buddies." Florida's own María Elvira Salazar briefly joined the pile-on herself: within hours of the announcement she posted that any deal with Rodríguez's government carried an expiration date tied to Trump's time in office and wrote, "Delcy is the wrong person to make this deal with," before deleting the post and swapping in a message praising the agreement roughly an hour later, provided Venezuela eventually holds free elections. The flip has since become a live issue in her reelection bid against Democratic challenger Eliott Rodríguez in Florida's 27th Congressional District. On the oversight side, Sen. Jack Reed, who holds the top Democratic slot on the panel overseeing the armed services, called the Pentagon's role in the deal "a blatant abuse of power and taxpayer dollars" and is pushing for a full accounting of its legal basis; House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rick Crawford struck a softer tone, saying only that he expects a fuller briefing from the administration soon. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz has gone further, calling for the entire arrangement to be halted.
For now, LT's answer to readers asking whether this is a 25-year or 100-year deal is that both figures have been stated on the record by officials who ought to know, no contract has been made public, and Venezuela's own law points toward the shorter number. That gap, and the unresolved questions about who's actually profiting on the other end of it, is the story until someone releases the paperwork.
