During a meeting at the White House, Trump said he would try to "cut a deal" to determine which firms get to produce Venezuelan oil.
"We're going to be making the decision as to which oil companies are going to go in — that we're going to allow to go in. [We're] going to cut a deal with the companies," he said.
"We'll probably do that today or very shortly thereafter," he added.
Representatives of the nation's biggest oil firms said they want to go into the country but also expressed concerns during the portion of the meeting that was public.
"As a depletion business, the biggest challenge we have is finding resources. There's an opportunity in Venezuela with all the resources," ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods said.
However, he said that today, Venezuela is "uninvestable" and significant changes have to be made to the country's commercial framework and legal system.
Exxon, along with ConocoPhillips, were operating in Venezuela until they left in 2007. Chevron is the only U.S. oil firm still operating there
Woods added that Exxon would like to start assessing the situation and said that the company could eventually be involved in Venezuela in some way.
"We think it's absolutely critical in the short term that we get a technical team in place to assess the current state of the industry and the assets to understand what would be involved," he said.
"With the invitation of the Venezuelan government and with appropriate security guarantees, we are ready to put a team on the ground there. We also have an integrated set of capabilities, from production to refining to trading, and I think we can be of assistance to getting the Venezuelan crude to market," he added.
At Friday's meeting, Chevron Vice Chair Mark Nelson indicated that the company sees a path forward to ramping up its production.
"I think we have a path forward here very shortly to be able to increase our liftings from those joint ventures 100 percent — essentially effective immediately," he said. "We are also able to increase our production within our own disciplined investment schemes by about 50 percent just in the next 18 to 24 months, and that's just leveraging what's on the ground."
But asked by Trump whether the company would be more focused on old or new infrastructure in Venezuela, he did not commit to building anything new.
"It's a little bit of a mix, but today it's mostly us taking the equipment of today [and] getting it to the standards that we are accustomed to. … most of the investments that we've been making are about getting it up to our standards," Nelson said.
"Well I think you're going to make an investment, but you're going to get your money back very quickly," Trump responded.
Read more at TheHill.com.
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