MIAMI — Nearly six months into the war pitting the United States and Israel against Iran, American drivers are still shelling out well above what they paid before the fighting began. But according to one of the nation's largest refiners, the pain at the pump would be worse without an unexpected assist: oil from Venezuela.
Regular gasoline is running $4.07 a gallon nationally this week, still inflated ever since Iran moved to choke off traffic through the Strait of Hormuz — a passage that under normal conditions handles roughly a fifth of the planet's oil shipments. Florida isn't spared either: state prices are hovering near $3.92 a gallon as of this week, a modest reprieve from the national figure but still nowhere close to the roughly $3-a-gallon prices Floridians saw before hostilities broke out.
Why Chevron Is Leaning on Caracas
Chevron remains the sole major American oil company with active operations inside Venezuela, and it has doubled down on that position as wartime supply shocks rippled through global markets. Andy Walz, who leads the company's global refining division, told CBS News that shipments of Venezuelan heavy crude have kept its Pascagoula, Mississippi, plant humming nonstop, feeding the refinery oil it simply had no way to access before the war. "This ship is lowering prices in America," Walz said, crediting a supply route that didn't exist a year earlier.
That access owes itself to an upheaval few saw coming. U.S. forces seized longtime ruler Nicolás Maduro on narco-trafficking charges in early January, and his former vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, was sworn in days later as interim president. Washington moved fast to capitalize: the Treasury Department cleared Venezuela's state oil firm, PDVSA, to sell crude straight to American buyers, and the White House temporarily suspended Jones Act shipping restrictions to ease fuel movement between domestic ports. An Associated Press dispatch from the time linked both moves directly to the administration's push to expand global oil supply during the conflict.
Output Is Rising, Though Not Overnight
Chevron's joint ventures with PDVSA are now producing roughly 280,000 barrels daily, a 15% jump over the prior half-year, chief financial officer Eimear Bonner told analysts on the company's second-quarter earnings call, according to S&P Global. Venezuela's total oil output nationwide has reached roughly 1.2 million barrels a day, and Chevron is aiming to grow its own Venezuelan production by up to 50% before the end of 2028. President Trump claimed credit for the turnaround earlier this month, declaring the company was "back, far bigger and stronger than ever before" — remarks that came as he publicly criticized Chevron's CEO for not crediting the administration in a TV interview. Notably, Chevron has said it's covering this buildout entirely through cash generated by its Venezuelan operations rather than dipping into its worldwide capital budget — a choice that could throttle the pace of expansion if crude prices soften.
A Bittersweet Development for Miami's Venezuelan Community
For South Florida's sizable Venezuelan population, this news carries mixed emotions. The very political shakeup that reopened the oil spigot has unfolded alongside a separate federal effort to strip legal status from Venezuelan migrants. The Supreme Court cleared the path last fall for the administration to end Temporary Protected Status for roughly 350,000 Venezuelans nationwide, and the legal fight is still unresolved — the Justice Department asked the justices this summer to kick the underlying case back to a lower court, with TPS holders required to respond by mid-August, per SCOTUSblog. For many families across Miami-Dade, cheaper gasoline offers little comfort set against the threat of losing work authorization and deportation protections.
How much longer drivers see this relief hinges largely on the war's trajectory. A fragile ceasefire arrangement has collapsed multiple times since spring, and Washington reinstated a naval blockade around Iran last month after Tehran struck commercial vessels that had bypassed its designated shipping corridors, CNN reported. Until conditions in the Strait of Hormuz settle down, analysts expect Venezuelan barrels to remain a partial cushion rather than a complete solution for American drivers — and, for the moment, one of the few bright spots in an otherwise strained U.S.-Venezuela relationship.
