Dragon field: Venezuela's gas for Shell and Trinidad waits on three keys

In the House of Representatives in Port of Spain, on May 13, a member asked what the government's fiscal policy is on cross-border natural gas coming into Trinidad and Tobago for use and processing. The finance minister answered with an admission: the arrangements with neighboring jurisdictions, including Venezuela, Barbados and Grenada, do not set fiscal terms for importing hydrocarbons. He called it, in his words, "a serious gap."

The gap has a name. It is Dragon, a gas field in Venezuelan waters about nine miles from Trinidad's Hibiscus platform, which Venezuela licensed to Shell and Trinidad's state-owned NGC in December 2023, for 30 years, to carry its gas to the Atlantic LNG liquefaction plant.

Almost three years later, the field does not produce, and its fate depends on three keys held in three capitals. Caracas holds the license. Washington holds the authorization and the account where the money would land. Port of Spain still does not know what it will charge.

What Caracas already wrote

On the Venezuelan side, Dragon's price was written early. The Official Gazette of January 29, 2024 published, according to the press that reproduced the resolution, that the state would receive no less than 45% of the project's gross revenue, with a 20% royalty on dry gas and 30% on heavy hydrocarbons, and that up to 70% of the gas would go to Atlantic LNG and the rest to petrochemicals. Another reading of the same resolution adds a special 5% royalty and arbitration in Venezuela, not international.

On paper, Venezuela kept almost half the gross revenue from a gas it neither liquefies nor sells. On paper.

A license nobody restored or revoked

That license had two bumpy years. OFAC authorized it in October 2023, with permission to pay Venezuela in dollars or bolívares; revoked it in April 2025; and issued another in October of that year, the first of three stages and on condition that U.S. companies secure a commercial stake. Its financial terms were not published. Days earlier, the State Department had backed the project with an explicit limit: that it not provide "significant benefit" to the Maduro government.

In Caracas, the government of the time approved on October 27, 2025 the immediate suspension of all energy cooperation agreements with Trinidad and Tobago, and in December announced their termination. Trinidad's energy minister said in January that his government never received official notice. This year, Caracas signed Loran phase I with Shell, in June, and awarded phase II to BP, in partnership with XRG and UCC, in August. For Dragon, we found no 2026 act that restores, modifies or revokes the license.

On September 23, in New York, the acting president and Trinidad's prime minister agreed on a nine-area agenda, energy among them, and official visits with no date. The text does not mention Dragon.

Where the money would land

If the project moves ahead under 2026 rules, the money would not follow the route the 2024 Gazette imagined. OFAC's General License 50C, of August 27, authorizes Shell, BP and four other oil companies to operate in Venezuela, and requires that oil or gas taxes and royalties to the government or PDVSA go into the accounts the U.S. Treasury opened under Executive Order 14,373. Local taxes and permit fees stay outside. Those accounts are held in custody, on behalf of the Government of Venezuela, and their disbursement is determined by the Secretary of State.

In cash terms: Venezuela would accrue the Dragon royalty, but being able to use it would depend on a decision made in Washington. The same license requires contract disputes to be resolved in the United States, the United Kingdom, France or Singapore; the 2024 resolution, according to the press that reproduced it, provided for arbitration in Venezuela. And NGC, the Trinidadian partner, is not listed in the general license's annex of companies: it operates under the October 2025 specific license, whose terms are not public.

What Trinidad would charge

On the other side of the line, the gap is literal. In May the finance minister listed possible mechanisms — fixed fees for importing hydrocarbons, charges by volume consumed, transit fees by distance, a cross-border access fee — and announced a fiscal review committee for the whole gas chain. An earlier committee, created in January 2025, had three months and its tenure ended before the work was done. The 2026-2027 budget, presented on October 12, is the next occasion for that list to stop being a list.

Trinidad needs the gas. It produced 2,438 million cubic feet a day between January and May 2026, against an average of 2,541 in 2025, and Atlantic LNG's first train produced nothing in those months.

This has happened before

There is a precedent for what happens when the split does not come. Loran-Manatee, the other large shared field, had a framework treaty in 2007 and a unitization agreement in 2010; in 2019 the two governments terminated it so each could develop its share separately. Shell took the investment decision on the Trinidad side, Manatee, in July 2024, and gas is due to start flowing in 2027. The Venezuelan side, Loran, received its licenses in 2026, sixteen years after that unitization agreement.

Three paths

The 2023 license survives

Caracas treats the 2025 suspension as an act of the previous government that was never formalized with Trinidad, and Dragon moves ahead on the 2024 terms, adjusted to what the general license requires on payments and arbitration. It is the path Shell describes: its chief executive said in July they hope to reach a final investment decision "at some point in 2027, all going well." The signal would be an act published in the Gazette ratifying or modifying the license.

New license, new terms

Caracas rewrites Dragon the way it wrote Loran this year: a new license, signed at Miraflores, with the split among partners to be defined. On that path, the 45% floor on gross revenue goes back on the table. The signal would be an announcement like Shell's in June or BP's in August, with Dragon in the headline.

The keys wait on each other

Trinidad does not set its charges, Caracas does not touch the license, and Shell's investment decision slips beyond 2027. The first signal comes soon: a Trinidad budget, on October 12, with no regime for imported gas.

Meanwhile, Dragon's gas stays under the sea, with its price written in Caracas and its collection set to go through Washington.