Venezuelan Oil? There’s Something Else America Needs

President Donald Trump’s assertion that U.S. companies will gain access to Venezuela’s vast oil reserves has seemingly sealed the wider belief that energy triggered the current row. But there’s more to it, an uncertain prize: the country’s largely uncharted mineral and metals wealth.

Beyond crude, Venezuela is believed to hold deposits of minerals and metals that could qualify as “critical” under U.S. national security definitions, potentially including rare earth elements. These materials are essential for sectors ranging from defense and aerospace to clean energy and advanced electronics, making them a strategic focus for Washington as it seeks to reduce dependence on foreign, particularly Chinese, supply chains.

But experts equally lend caution that translating Venezuela’s geological potential into a reliable source of critical minerals for the United States would be extraordinarily difficult and, in the near to medium term, unlikely to meaningfully strengthen American supply security.

“There is an awareness within the administration that even beyond oil, there’s wider natural resource value in the country,” said Reed Blakemore, director of research at the Atlantic Council Global Energy Center. “However, if we’re talking about the conditions under which we are able to exploit those mineral resources and bring them to market, it’s a much more challenging story, and even, frankly, more challenging than the oil story.”

Not surveyed, unexplored deposits

Venezuela’s mineral endowment, however, remains poorly quantified, with limited modern geological surveys after decades of political upheaval and underinvestment. Mining operations would also face acute security risks. Many mineral-rich regions are affected by armed groups and guerrilla forces engaged in illegal gold mining, while environmental damage linked to unregulated extraction has already drawn international criticism.

Even if U.S. firms were willing to shoulder those risks, mining is only the first hurdle. Most rare earth elements must be refined and processed, a stage dominated by China. According to the International Energy Agency, China accounted for more than 90% of global rare earth refining in 2024, a position built through decades of subsidies, industrial scale-up and looser environmental standards.

“China still holds near-singular capacity to process rare earth metals, and that industrial and geopolitical edge cannot be overcome overnight,” said Joel Dodge, director of industrial policy and economic security at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator.

Rare earths have become a recurring flashpoint in US–China trade tensions, particularly after Beijing imposed export controls during recent disputes. Those moves have heightened U.S. concerns about the fragility of its supply chains for materials critical to weapons systems, semiconductors and renewable energy technologies.

60 Critical Mineral Listed

The U.S. Geological Survey currently lists 60 critical minerals essential to economic and national security, including aluminum, cobalt, copper, nickel and 15 rare earth elements such as neodymium, dysprosium and samarium. While these elements are not truly rare in geological terms, extraction and processing are capital-intensive, environmentally challenging and time-consuming.

Notably, Venezuela does not appear on the USGS list of countries with confirmed rare earth reserves, a reflection of data gaps rather than definitive absence. Experts believe the country likely hosts deposits of coltan, from which tantalum and niobium are derived, as well as bauxite, a source of aluminum and gallium. All four metals are designated as critical by the USGS.

Former president Hugo Chávez publicly touted Venezuela’s coltan potential in 2009, referring to it as “blue gold.” In 2016, his successor Nicolás Maduro launched the Orinoco Mining Arc to promote mineral development, but the zone has since become synonymous with illicit mining and weak governance.

“While the country sits on large deposits of mineral resources, it is crippled by a combination of poor geological data, low-skilled labor, organized crime, lack of investments and a volatile policy environment,” says Sung Choi, metals and mining analyst at BloombergNEF. He adds that Venezuela is “unlikely to play any meaningful role in the critical minerals sector at least for the next decade.”