Venezuela Oil Production by Year, 1980 to 2026

Venezuela produced 1,160 thousand barrels a day of crude oil in June 2026, matching May as its highest month since January 2019, according to the EIA’s international statistics, and the EIA’s October 2026 Short-Term Energy Outlook estimates 1.21 million barrels a day for September. For the full year 2025 the EIA count is 973 thousand barrels a day, 1.15% of world crude output and 31% of what the country pumped in 1997.

That 2025 figure is 85% above the 2020 low of 527 thousand barrels a day, when the monthly count bottomed at 360 thousand in September 2020. It is still 1,527 thousand barrels a day short of the 2,500 the EIA records for 2014. The table below carries every year from 1980, next to total liquids, the share of world crude, and the crude the United States imported from Venezuela that year. For a list of who else sits in the producer group, see OPEC members in 2026, with dated entries and exits.

Annual crude output, 1980 to 2025

The production column is the EIA series “crude oil including lease condensate,” in thousand barrels a day, from the agency’s International Energy Statistics bulk file. The liquids column adds natural gas plant liquids, refinery processing gain and other liquids. Through 1991 the two columns match in every year except 1984, because the EIA records almost no non-crude liquids for Venezuela before then; from 1993 the gap runs between about 20 and 335 thousand barrels a day. The import column comes from a different EIA program, the U.S. petroleum supply survey, which records crude by country of origin.

The post-1980 high is 1997 at 3,182 thousand barrels a day, which was 4.9% of the world’s crude that year. The series itself starts in 1973, and 1973 is higher still at about 3,366 thousand. Between 2014 and 2020 output fell by 79%, and the steepest single-year fall was 2019, when the annual average dropped by 608 thousand barrels a day, or 41%, from 2018.

Plateau, climb, slide, collapse, recovery

Plotted, Table 1 is five segments rather than one smooth curve, and each has an explanation in the EIA’s own analysis.

1980 to 1989: a lower plateau

Output drifted from 2,168 thousand barrels a day in 1980 to a low of 1,677 thousand in 1985 and closed the decade at 1,907 thousand. The decade averaged about 1,871 thousand barrels a day, and the country’s share of world crude stayed between 3.1% and 3.8%. The EIA’s February 2024 country brief notes that the state company Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PdVSA) was formed when Venezuela nationalized its oil industry in the 1970s, and that the government gave it significant autonomy until the 1990s.

1990 to 2001: the climb to 3.2 million

Production rose in six of the eight years from 1989 to 1997, from 1,907 to 3,182 thousand barrels a day. U.S. imports from Venezuela rose with it, from 495 thousand barrels a day in 1989 to 1,394 thousand in 1997, which was 16.9% of all U.S. crude imports that year and 44% of everything Venezuela produced. 1998 and 1999 gave part of the gain back, and 2001 still stood at 2,807 thousand.

2002 to 2015: a step down, then a long flat stretch

2002 and 2003 fell to 2,435 and 2,303 thousand barrels a day. The EIA’s May 2019 Today in Energy article dates the low point of that episode to January 2003, “when a nationwide strike and civil unrest largely brought the operations” of PdVSA to a halt. Output recovered to 2,840 thousand in 2005, then settled between 2,410 and 2,520 thousand from 2008 to 2015. The EIA prints exactly 2,500 for each year from 2011 to 2014, a round figure that reads as an estimate held level rather than four measured years that happened to match.

2016 to 2020: the collapse

From 2,489 thousand barrels a day in 2015, output fell to 2,254, 1,997, 1,486, 878 and finally 527 thousand in 2020. The EIA’s May 2019 article blamed widespread power outages, mismanagement of the oil industry and U.S. sanctions directed at the energy sector and PdVSA. It also counted active oil rigs falling from nearly 70 in the first quarter of 2016 to 24 in the first quarter of 2019, and production declines averaging 33,000 barrels a day each month in 2018. Venezuela’s world share went from 3.08% in 2015 to 0.70% in 2020.

2021 to 2025: a partial recovery

Every year since 2020 has been higher than the one before: 595, 724, 771, 863 and 973 thousand barrels a day. The EIA’s October 2023 Today in Energy article tied the earlier part of that rise to diluent supply and to Chevron’s joint ventures. Diluent matters because, as the EIA’s 2019 article explains, the extra-heavy crude from the Orinoco Oil Belt has to be diluted with condensate or other light oils before it can move by pipeline. That article put Chevron’s share at 135,000 barrels a day in 2023. Its projection of about 900,000 barrels a day by the end of 2024 was a 2023 expectation; the monthly count for December 2024 now stands at 890 thousand.

Month by month: January 2025 to September 2026

The EIA publishes two monthly crude numbers for Venezuela, and they do not match. The Short-Term Energy Outlook’s Table 3d (crude oil) runs 30 thousand barrels a day below the international statistics series (crude including lease condensate) in every month from January 2025 to June 2026. Table 3d carries a footnote that differences in reported data across countries can cause inconsistencies in where crude ends and other liquids begin. Total liquids, in Table 3c, line up with the international series. So the 2025 annual average is 0.94 million barrels a day in the outlook and 973 thousand in the international series: the same agency, two definitions, both correct on their own terms.

Two things stand out. One is the dip: the outlook’s crude figure goes from 0.97 million barrels a day in November 2025 to 0.93 million in December and 0.80 million in January 2026, then back to 0.95 million in February. The EIA’s February 2026 outlook explained it: an oil blockade and the interception of sanctioned tankers near Venezuela halted a large portion of the country’s exports in December, which shut in production. Exports recovered in January after licenses were granted to the trading companies Vitol and Trafigura, and OFAC then expanded the general license so more companies could transport and sell Venezuelan crude. That outlook expected production to return to pre-blockade activity by the second quarter of 2026, and the October numbers show it did: the second-quarter average of 1.11 million barrels a day is above every quarter of 2025.

The other is the climb after that. From January to September 2026 the outlook’s crude figure rose by 410 thousand barrels a day, from 800 thousand to 1,210 thousand (1.21 million barrels a day is 1,210 thousand). Quarterly averages from the outlook’s own quarterly table are 0.91, 0.94, 0.96 and 0.96 million for the four quarters of 2025, then 0.93, 1.11 and 1.18 million for the first three quarters of 2026. The outlook’s monthly values for the latest months are estimates and tend to be revised, a point the section on revisions below puts numbers on. For how to read those tables, see our guide to the EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook.

OPEC’s two series and the EIA’s third

Search for Venezuela’s production and three different numbers come up for the same month, often without labels. They come from different methods, and each is published as its own series.

• OPEC, secondary sources. The Monthly Oil Market Report’s Table 5-7 gives each member’s crude production “based on secondary sources,” OPEC’s assessment from outside estimates. It is the table that carries OPEC’s group total; the notes say totals reflect available secondary sources to date.
• OPEC, direct communication. Table 5-8 gives crude production “based on direct communication,” the figure as reported by each member country. Some countries leave cells blank in that table; Venezuela fills them.
• EIA. The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s international statistics and its Short-Term Energy Outlook, built independently of both OPEC tables.

The gap between OPEC’s two tables grew each year in this window. It was 23 thousand barrels a day in 2023, 54 thousand in 2024 and 208 thousand in November 2025, when Venezuela’s reported figure was 22% above the secondary-source figure. The EIA sits between the two in every row of Table 3 except 2024, where it is slightly below both, at 863 thousand against OPEC’s 867 and 921. None of the three is the official number in a sense that settles the matter; they answer slightly different questions. A figure attributed to “OPEC” without a table name could be either one, and the difference in November 2025 was larger than the EIA’s entire increase in annual output from 2023 to 2025, 202 thousand barrels a day.

The EIA revises its own history as well, and its archive shows by how much. In May 2019 the EIA reported that April 2019 production averaged 830,000 barrels a day; the international series now carries 885 thousand for that month. In October 2023 the EIA reported 735,000 barrels a day for September 2023 and a recent high of 790,000 in July 2023; the same months now read 765 and 820 thousand. Each revision raised the figure by 30 to 55 thousand barrels a day. Anyone comparing a number from an old article with a number from today’s database is partly comparing two vintages. That October 2023 article also said Venezuela produced about 3.2 million barrels a day in 2000; the international series has 2000 at 2,894 thousand for crude and 3,220 thousand for total liquids, so the 3.2 million matches the liquids definition. Treating it as crude would overstate that year by more than 300 thousand.

OPEC membership and quota status add one more layer. The EIA’s October 2026 outlook notes that Iran, Libya and Venezuela are not subject to the OPEC+ agreements, so Venezuela has no production target to compare against, unlike most members. Our explainer on OPEC+ quotas and compliance covers how the targets work for those that do have one.

What US refiners imported from Venezuela

Imports from Venezuela peaked in 1997 at 1,394 thousand barrels a day and stayed above 1.1 million every year from 1995 to 2007. They then shrank faster than production did: 912 thousand in 2012, 618 in 2017, 506 in 2018 and 81 in 2019. The monthly series shows 561 thousand in January 2019, 47 thousand in March, 11 thousand in May, and then nothing until January 2023. The EIA’s February 2024 country brief dates the stop to shortly after the United States sanctioned PdVSA in January 2019; OFAC’s Venezuela page lists the oil-sector determination under Executive Order 13850 as effective January 28, 2019.

In 2025 Venezuela supplied 2.3% of U.S. crude imports, against 16.9% in 1997. Measured from the other side, the United States took about 14% of Venezuela’s 2025 crude output, against 44% in 1997. That ratio is approximate: the import series counts barrels entering the United States, not barrels lifted in Venezuela, and the EIA’s February 2026 outlook noted that oil lifted by trading companies in early 2026 went first to storage terminals around the Caribbean, so arrivals can lag production by weeks or months.

2025 itself was two halves. Monthly imports ran 287, 209 and 253 thousand barrels a day in the first quarter, then fell to 86 in June and 7 in July, after Chevron’s license wound down (see Table 5). They recovered to 102 thousand in September and 137 thousand in December. 2026 has been a different scale: 373 thousand in March, 630 in June, 701 in July and 655 in August. Set against the international production series, U.S. imports equalled about 24% of Venezuelan crude output in January 2026 and 54% in June 2026. The full picture of where the rest of U.S. imports come from, and how the 2026 Persian Gulf disruption changed it, is in U.S. oil imports by country, explained.

Why the Gulf Coast? Venezuelan export grades are heavy and sour; OFAC’s FAQ 1226 names Merey 16 and bitumen blends among the crude blends it treats as Venezuelan-origin oil. The EIA’s October 2023 article said Gulf Coast refineries are well suited to that kind of crude, and described Citgo, then PdVSA’s U.S. subsidiary, as having three refineries at Lemont, Lake Charles and Corpus Christi with a combined capacity of over 800,000 barrels a day, designed to process heavy oil. OFAC’s FAQ 1246 (March 2026) says any sale of Citgo shares in the Crystallex case still requires a specific license. How heavy crudes are classified, and which refineries can run them, is covered in crude oil API gravity and sulfur, explained, and the discount heavy barrels trade at is the subject of the WCS-WTI differential, the Canadian heavy benchmark that competes for the same coking capacity.

OFAC general licenses for Venezuelan oil, dated

Since 2019, the U.S. trade in Venezuelan oil has run through general licenses issued by the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control under the Venezuela Sanctions Regulations, 31 CFR part 591. A general license authorizes a described activity for every U.S. person without an individual application. OFAC replaces licenses with lettered versions (46, 46A, 46B and so on), so the useful facts are when the first version appeared, which version is current, and whether it is still in force. Specific licenses issued to individual companies are not listed on OFAC’s program page and are not in this table.

What the current licenses allow, in OFAC’s words

OFAC’s FAQ 1227 describes the oil license (then GL 46B) as authorizing activity ordinarily incident to the lifting, exportation, sale, storage, purchase, delivery or transportation of Venezuelan-origin oil by an established U.S. entity, including refining and resale, swaps of oil, diluents or refined products, and financing of cargoes. FAQ 1229 defines an established U.S. entity as one organized under U.S. law on or before January 29, 2025. GL 46E, dated September 28, 2026, also requires anyone who sells Venezuelan-origin oil to countries other than the United States to report the parties, quantities, values, destinations, dates and any payments to the Government of Venezuela to the State Department and the Department of Energy, ten days after the first transaction and every 90 days after that.

The exclusions repeat across the licenses. FAQ 1227 and FAQ 1245 list: no transactions on terms that are not commercially reasonable; no payment in gold, debt swaps or Venezuelan government digital currency; nothing involving persons in Russia, Iran, North Korea or Cuba, or entities they own or control; nothing involving a Venezuelan or U.S. entity owned or controlled by, or in a joint venture with, a person in China; no unblocking of blocked property; and nothing involving a blocked vessel. FAQ 1231 adds that GL 46 does not restrict resale of Venezuelan-origin oil to China by an established U.S. entity. FAQ 1237 says routine local taxes, permits and fees may be paid to the government, while royalties, per-barrel production levies and federal taxes must go into the Foreign Government Deposit Funds set up by Executive Order 14373.

The upstream licenses are narrower than the oil-trading one. FAQ 1228 states that GL 46 alone does not authorize exploration, drilling or negotiations to develop fields. That work runs through GL 48 (goods, technology and services for exploration and production, including spare parts and well stimulation products, per FAQ 1241, without new joint ventures), GL 49 (negotiating contingent contracts for new investment, with performance needing a specific license, per FAQ 1244), GL 50C (full operations, new investment and new joint ventures for the six companies in its annex) and GL 52C (transactions with PdVSA, including new investment contracts and joint ventures, per FAQ 1245, but excluding PdVSA bonds, equity and the governance of PDV Holding, Citgo Holding or Citgo Petroleum).

Lining up licenses against barrels

Putting Table 5 next to Tables 1 and 2 shows how quickly each authorization reached the import data, and how much slower production responded. The pairs below use only dates from the OFAC documents and figures from the EIA series above.

The pattern in Table 6 is that imports respond within one to three months of a license change, in either direction, while production moves more slowly. The 2025 case is the clearest: U.S. imports fell by 97% between March and July 2025 while Venezuelan output, by the EIA’s count, kept growing, which means the barrels went somewhere other than the United States. The 2019 case ran the other way, with imports and production falling together, and the EIA’s May 2019 article pointed to power outages and the departure of oilfield service companies alongside the sanctions. Licenses set who may buy; the production line depends on diluent, power, rigs and reservoirs as well.

Why two Venezuela figures for the same month disagree

• Crude versus liquids. A figure of 1.28 million and one of 1.21 million for September 2026 are both EIA numbers; the first counts all liquids. Always check which line a number comes from before comparing it with OPEC, whose tables are crude only.
• STEO versus international statistics. The 30 thousand barrel a day offset described above means an outlook figure and a database figure for the same month differ even when nothing was revised.
• Estimates held level. 2011 to 2014 all read 2,500 thousand barrels a day. Year-to-year changes across that stretch carry no information.
• Vintages. Monthly values a few months old can still move by tens of thousands of barrels a day, as the 2019 and 2023 examples show. Note the release date of any figure you save.
• Imports versus liftings. The U.S. import series counts barrels entering the United States by country of origin, not barrels lifted in Venezuela, so oil that sat in Caribbean storage in early 2026 shows up in a later month.
• No EIA forecast for Venezuela. The outlook forecasts OPEC as a whole. A 2026 or 2027 Venezuela projection attributed to the EIA is a misreading; the country row is blank after the latest estimated month.

Five checks before repeating a Venezuela barrel count

Most of the conflicting numbers in circulation come down to a few labels. Before using one, run it through these steps.

1. Which publisher? EIA, OPEC, or a figure attributed to Venezuela or PdVSA directly. If it is OPEC, find whether it came from the secondary-sources table or the direct-communication table.
2. Crude or liquids? In the October 2026 outlook no 2026 month exceeds 1.21 million barrels a day of crude, so a higher 2026 figure from that period is likely a liquids total or a direct-communication figure; compare with Table 2 and Table 3.
3. Which period? A month, a quarter and a year differ. In 2026 alone the outlook’s crude figure ranged from 0.80 million in January to 1.21 million in September.
4. Which vintage? If the source is more than a few months old, check the same month in the current EIA or OPEC release; the figure may have been revised by 30 thousand barrels a day or more.
5. Does it come with a license claim? Check the OFAC Venezuela page for the current version; Table 5 shows that versions changed four or five times in eight months during 2026.

The rest of the producer picture is on the supply, trade and refining shelf of the deep-dive library. If your question is where Venezuela’s barrels end up once refined in the United States, the next stop is U.S. refinery capacity in 2026, which lists the Gulf Coast plants by size, including the heavy-crude coking capacity that makes Merey worth buying.

Data and sources: U.S. Energy Information Administration, International Energy Statistics bulk file (INTL.zip), file dated October 19, 2026, Venezuela and world series as listed under Table 1, checked October 31, 2026. EIA, U.S. Imports from Venezuela of Crude Oil (annual and monthly) and U.S. Imports of Crude Oil, release of October 30, 2026, checked October 31, 2026. EIA, Short-Term Energy Outlook, October 2026 (monthly spreadsheet and full report, Tables 3c and 3d) and the February 2026 edition, checked October 31, 2026. EIA Today in Energy, Venezuelan crude oil production falls to lowest level since January 2003 (May 20, 2019) and Venezuela’s heavy crude oil output increases are limited following U.S. sanctions relief (October 23, 2023), checked October 31, 2026. EIA, Country Analysis Brief: Venezuela (February 2024), checked October 31, 2026. OPEC, Monthly Oil Market Report, April 2025 (Wayback copy, saved January 4, 2026) and December 2025 (Wayback copy, saved April 5, 2026), Tables 5-7 and 5-8. U.S. Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control, Venezuela-Related Sanctions, Archive of Revoked and Expired General Licenses and Venezuela Sanctions FAQs, with the general license documents listed under Table 5, all checked October 31, 2026. Shares, gaps, averages and ratios are this page’s arithmetic.