The gas already has another buyer

On Wednesday 2 September 2026 Venezuela signed eight energy agreements in the Salón del Perú of the Miraflores Palace with companies from the United States, Italy and Venezuela itself. The ceremony was presided over by acting president Delcy Rodríguez and by the United States secretary of energy, Chris Wright ^[1]. Chevron amended the contracts of three joint ventures and added the Carabobo 1 and 2 fields ^[1]. Its chief executive, Mike Wirth, announced an investment above seven billion dollars to bring more than five hundred thousand barrels a day to market within five years ^[1]. Eni took the Junín 5 block of the Orinoco Belt and declared a target of one million barrels a day ^[1]. GE Vernova signed with PDVSA the recovery of the oil industry's electrical infrastructure, so that the fields generate their own power and stop drawing on the national system ^[1]. The second agreement, with Corpoelec, covers the rehabilitation of hydroelectric and thermal plants, transmission and distribution ^{[1] [2]}. Nobody disclosed the amount ^[3].

The larger phenomenon of which that signing is today the best available example is not one more oil deal. Venezuela is rebuilding by contract, with foreign operators and in a single move, its three energy systems, and it is doing so in the year gas became the most contested input in the world again, because the people building artificial intelligence burn it in turbines of their own. The package puts the barrel first, the gas as an annex and the fastest-growing demand nowhere. Wright told reporters the plan is to concentrate, over six to twelve months, on getting the existing assets back into operation, stabilising the grid and extending the hours of service ^[4]. June's memorandum set a thousand megawatts recovered within twenty-four months and more than five thousand within four or five years ^[5]. Those are the facts.

What was actually signed

The axis of the package is the barrel. Wright said so on CNBC from Caracas on the morning of the signing: Venezuela produces a little over 1.2 million barrels a day today, will pass 1.5 million in the first half of 2027 and two million before the decade ends ^[6]. Heavy crude will be swapped for medium barrels for the strategic reserve, and the package is «downward pressure on oil prices» ^[6]. The crude's buyer is named, and so is the price. Two days earlier the White House had published the terms of the agreement with North American Blue Energy Partners: seventeen fields holding 65 billion barrels and concessions of a hundred years according to Washington, twenty-five according to Rodríguez ^[7]. The Department of War keeps a 35 % stake in the parent company, and the United States buys a fifth of all production at production cost ^[7]. Wright assured Bloomberg that day that China will have no claim on the revenue from new production while the debt is restructured ^[8]. The gas is the annex, and Claudio Descalzi of Eni mentioned it only as potential: Perla, «a giant with more than 25 trillion cubic feet», and Corocoro ^[1]. Venezuela holds 5.5 trillion cubic metres, the seventh-largest reserve in the world and the largest in the region, and has never exported a cubic metre ^[9]. Around 80 % of that gas is associated with oil, and part of it is flared ^[9]. The planned outlet is Trinidad, three years away once Dragon starts ^[9]. Atlantic LNG exported nine million tonnes in 2025 against a capacity of twelve and shut one of its trains in May for lack of gas ^[10]. The molecule is there; the plan is not. The two electricity agreements are written to serve the barrel: the first takes the oil fields off the national grid and the second repairs what exists so the country has more hours of light ^[3].

The grid that has to carry it

Guri, with 10,235 megawatts installed, runs at half its design capacity, according to Wright ^[4]. The thermal plants generate 2,700 of the 21,000 megawatts installed, according to engineer Alberto Fuentes, former national operations manager at Corpoelec ^[11]. That fleet runs on gas, and Fuentes explains that many machines burn diesel because PDVSA does not deliver the fuel in volume or at pressure, so they wear out 30 % faster ^[11]. The country flares gas while its gas turbines burn diesel. Demand touched 15,625 megawatts on 10 August, with a deficit above 2,500 at peak ^[11]. Conindustria measured the cost: in the second quarter, companies spent 214 of 488 working hours without electricity, 43.9 % ^[12]. On 29 August, four days before the signing, a blackout darkened five western states ^[12]. The National Assembly reformed the electricity law in June and allowed private capital for the first time in fifteen years, with concessions of up to twenty-five years in generation, transmission and distribution ^[5]. What is decided about those concessions will fix what Venezuelan electricity is for, for a generation.

The elephant: the gas already has another buyer

While Caracas signed for the barrel, the largest buyers of firm power in the world today are artificial-intelligence companies, and they buy whole generation. Hyperion, Meta's campus in Louisiana, was born in December 2024 with two gigawatts and three Entergy gas plants ^[13]. On 27 March 2026 the company agreed to finance seven more, so that ten plants and seven and a half gigawatts would expand the grid of the entire state by more than 30 % ^[13]. In July the company announced five gigawatts of compute and more than fifty billion dollars ^[14]. Elon Musk does it without a utility in between. xAI bought five 380-megawatt Doosan turbines in January, almost two gigawatts in all ^[15]. Mississippi authorised 41 turbines for it in Southaven in March, by May it was running 46 with permits for fifteen, and SpaceX committed another 2.8 billion dollars to turbines when it went public ^[15]. The Wall Street Journal described the strategy in August as bring your own power, with capacity that would go from two gigawatts to between ten and fifteen by the end of 2027 ^[15]. The rockets have a pipeline too: SpaceX is laying eight miles of pipe, christened Starpipe, to Starbase in Texas to liquefy methane for Starship from January 2027 ^[16]. Today it feeds rockets; the declared destination is data centres in orbit ^[16].

The sum is already measured. Global Energy Monitor published on 25 August that the gas capacity proposed to connect directly to data centres in the United States went from 97 to 189 gigawatts in the first half of 2026, and the country's total gas in development rose from 252 to 378 gigawatts ^[17]. The International Energy Agency estimates that data centres consumed 415 terawatt-hours in 2024 and will consume around 945 in 2030 ^[18]. The supplier is the same. GE Vernova closed the second quarter with 116 gigawatts of turbines committed, and a heavy-duty turbine ordered today is delivered in 2031 ^{[19] [20]}. All of it runs on gas. RBC calculates that data centres will consume 6.1 billion cubic feet a day in 2030, some 20 % more gas burned for generation than in recent years, and names them alongside liquefied-gas exports as the two engines of American demand this decade ^[21]. Those exports already grew 23 % in the first half, to 17.4 billion cubic feet a day, with production at a record ^[22]. The world's largest producer and exporter of gas has begun burning at home, to feed intelligence, gas that competes with what it ships. That gave the molecule back a power it did not have five years ago, and Venezuela sits on the seventh-largest reserve on the planet. The scale is this: Venezuela produces around 2.3 billion cubic feet a day today, Dragon and Manatee would add close to a billion more, and data centres will burn 6.1 billion in 2030 ^{[9] [10] [21]}. At the American rate of extraction, the Venezuelan reserve would yield around 35 billion a day, almost six times that burn ^[9]. That gas does not reach Texas by pipeline but the same market by liquefied gas, and the nearest liquefaction plant works at three quarters for lack of gas ^[10]. The bridge exists, and nobody in the room named it.

An AI data centre tolerates no interruptions and cannot wait five years for a turbine, so the operator buys the whole generation, sites it next to the gas and pays the utility fifteen years of revenue up front, as Meta did in Louisiana ^[13]. That generation burns gas, and the country building it at the largest scale is also the one that exports the most gas ^[22]. Every cubic foot the United States burns at home to feed intelligence competes with the one it ships, and RBC names both, data centres and liquefied gas, as the engines of this decade's demand ^[21]. The market that tightens is supplied by whoever has the molecule, the plant and the contract. Venezuela has the first, Trinidad has the second at three quarters for lack of gas, and nobody has the contract ^[10].

The eight agreements are written for extraction, and they should be read that way: the axis is the barrel, with dated production targets and a declared buyer ^[6]. The gas appears as potential, with Dragon three years out and Perla as a reserves figure, and no export target with a date ^[9]. The two electricity agreements take the fields off the grid and repair what exists ^[3]. June's reform opens twenty-five-year concessions, those concessions will define who receives firm capacity for an entire generation, and none of it names the demand that grows fastest today ^[5].

The counterpoint has to be conceded whole, and it weighs. A grid where industry loses 44 % of its working hours hosts no compute, and promising it would be a fantasy ^[12]. Venezuelan gas is mostly associated, so it comes out with the crude or not at all, and the country has never exported a cubic metre ^[9]. The United States does not need Venezuelan gas at home, with its production at a record; the bridge is indirect, through liquefied gas and through the Caribbean, and it takes years ^[22]. Brazil wrote into its data-centre law the same week what energy an operator must buy, and Venezuela has many steps to take before it can demand anything of the kind ^[23]. Dragon has been next year for years: a thirty-year Venezuelan licence in 2023, an American permit revoked in May 2025, another in October and yet another in February, and still not the first cubic metre ^{[9] [10]}. The reserve attracts announcements, and announcements build nothing.

Even granting all of that, the absence remains. The package treats gas as an annex to oil in the year the market treats it as the bottleneck of intelligence, and no signatory said the sentence that would order the rest: our gas feeds that deployment. That sentence requires neither a perfect grid nor a law like Brazil's, only that the gas plan have a named buyer and a date, as the crude plan already does. The window Emilio Venuti described in May closes, without that sentence, with Venezuela watching from outside ^[24].

THE PLAY

1. Name the buyer in the gas plan. The crude has dated targets and a declared destination; the gas has reserves. Dragon, Manatee and Perla need a long-term contract with the market that sets the price of gas today, and that market is the one feeding generation for artificial intelligence. Whoever negotiates the gas should arrive with that demand on the table, not 2019's.
2. Put the compute where the gas is, not where the grid is. The bring-your-own-power strategy does not require Musk's scale. An inference module behind the meter, fed with gas that is flared today in Monagas or Zulia, has had a legal basis since June's reform and does not depend on Corpoelec, so start with the associated gas that already exists and with the load that tolerates latency.
3. Write into the concession what the electron is for. Venezuela is many steps from a law like Brazil's, but the twenty-five-year concessions are being signed now. Asking for firm capacity reserved for digital load and an annual report of sources and consumption costs one clause, and whatever is not in that contract will not exist in 2050.