Oil and gas in Venezuela: GeoPark, KEO and Hunt come in through the old fields

The international oil and gas summit opened on September 29 at the JW Marriott in Caracas with 650 executives, officials and diplomats registered, another 150 on the waiting list and tickets sold out at $2,950. The program puts bp and Shell alongside Trident, Corcel, Touchstone and UCC, a Qatari group that entered Venezuelan gas in August. It is a good picture of interest. To know who is really coming in you have to look at something else: what each one signed, over which field, and with what money.

Do that exercise with the companies' and the government's own documents and a different map appears from the one the headlines suggest. Among the companies coming in during 2026, those holding firm paper are mid-sized operators, private vehicles and Gulf capital. And what they are buying looks little like the Venezuela of megaprojects.

The firm paper is the old field

The first pattern shows up on its own once the table is sorted: the firmer the paper, the more mature the field. KEO is coming in to operate PetroUrdaneta, a joint venture with four fields in the Maracaibo basin, La Paz, Mara Oeste, Mara Este and El Moján. GeoPark is taking the Bare block in the Orinoco Belt, a field with some 1,100 wells that produces 11,000 barrels a day and in its best years passed 100,000. Hunt signed for Caro and Carisito, two fields in the east whose output the contract seeks to recover.

On September 29, from the summit podium, Felipe Bayón put numbers on GeoPark's plan: $7 billion through 2038 to take Bare from 11,000 to some 90,000 barrels a day, in phases, with outlays of $40 million to $80 million a year through 2028 and $120 million to $140 million in 2029 and 2030, and with operations starting in December. It is the same round number Chevron announced for its three joint ventures, spread over twelve years instead of five.

What remains at the memorandum stage is the larger-scale work. At Ayacucho 2, in the Orinoco Belt, Continental speaks of thirty billion barrels in place and of a contract "in the coming weeks" as of September 16; at the close of this piece it had not been signed.

The capital arriving buys the barrels that already exist first. It is the bet with the lowest geological risk and the fastest cash, and it says something about the horizon of entry: people are paying for what can be produced soon.

The money comes in by changing owners

GeoPark pays for Bare in shares. It issues 42.1 million new shares, at $12.22 each, to a Grupo Gilinski entity, which thereby ends up with about 56% of the company and control of it. The group had secured the contract with PDVSA; GeoPark brings the operation, commits to fund the entire investment and keeps a 65% net working interest.

A New York-listed company changes owners to enter Venezuela.

That change of owner also had to go past the creditors. GeoPark's notes due 2030 carry a change-of-control clause that is not triggered when the party taking charge is a "permitted holder," so the company asked noteholders to add Jaime Gilinski and his family to that definition. On September 23 it announced it had the consents, in exchange for $2.50 per $1,000 of debt, and set September 29 for signing the supplemental indenture. By then the group had already bought about 28% of the shares in the market.

KEO took a different route. Its Stockholm-listed parent built an indirect stake in PetroUrdaneta in stages through the Spanish vehicle of Novonor, the former Odebrecht: EUR 4.6 million in 2024 for the exclusive right to buy, another EUR 4.6 million in March 2026 to take 24% and, in July, a $37.5 million agreement for another 16% that will take it to 40%. It is now committing to lend the joint venture itself up to $350 million. And the parent does not plan to keep the oil business: it wants to separate it and list it in the United States. The route announced in July, a combination with Lionheart Holdings, was not completed within the exclusivity period and the parties agreed not to extend it; the company says the goal of listing KEO Energy remains intact.

The gap with Chevron runs deep. Its three joint ventures, among them Petroindependencia, where it holds 49%, plan to invest more than $7 billion over five years, at total costs the company puts below $20 a barrel and under what its release calls a "disciplined cash management model." The newcomers have no such cash in Venezuela: they bring it through a change of ownership, a capital market or their own balance sheet.

Local banks do not stretch far either: their entire loan book came to less than $4 billion at the end of June.

The new gas looks toward Trinidad

In gas, the newcomers are different, and they come from the Gulf. On August 13 bp received the license for phase 2 of Loran, in the Plataforma Deltana, with two equal partners: XRG, the international investment arm of the UAE's ADNOC, and UCC Oil and Gas, part of a Qatari energy, mining, concessions and construction group. The phase holds about 4 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas. Shell had held the license for Loran's first phase since June, a field whose reservoirs cross the border with Trinidad and Tobago. And UCC wants more: at the summit, its head of upstream said the company is negotiating its entry into other oil or gas areas, still unnamed.

The Venezuelan side was explicit about the destination. PDVSA Gas's vice president said in August that the goal with Loran is to make the country an exporter of methane: initially it will go to Trinidad and Tobago, with Asia and Europe in the plan, and part to petrochemicals and liquefaction. The power grid depends on another field, Cardón IV, run by a Repsol and Eni company, which according to the same official supplies 580 million cubic feet a day to the domestic market and could reach 1,200.

The gas the newcomers sign for looks mostly outward. What keeps the lights on in Venezuela is the gas that was already there.

The grid stays in state hands

In power, the year's large agreements are equipment and service contracts with the state companies, such as GE Vernova's alliances with PDVSA and with Corpoelec, whose target, according to the US embassy, is to add one gigawatt within 24 months and another five in the four years after that. How much of that power covers the promised barrels is worked out in our analysis of the gigawatt.

The gas-to-power companies that turned up at the summit came to look. InterEnergy operates in about ten countries, from Mexico to Chile; Caribe LNG says its first market is Colombia; AES expects to close its sale to a consortium led by GIP and EQT. None shows a signed Venezuelan instrument in its releases. The market drawing them in is being created by the new contracts: according to PDVSA's president, each operator will have to pay for or lease the power for its own field.

General License 48D, reissued on September 28 with no change on this point, authorizes selling them equipment and services for generation and excludes forming new companies in Venezuela to produce electricity.

Signing is not operating

That leaves the distance between signature and barrel. The Bare contract takes effect only after approvals and authorizations, including sanctions-compliance ones, within a period GeoPark estimates at 120 days at most; Bayón repeated it at the summit. KEO's agreements remain subject to what US Treasury licenses authorize. And none of the entrants in the table is among the six companies General License 50C names in writing.

Nor do they put many figures of their own on the table. Of the entrants in the table, GeoPark and KEO are the only ones whose releases carry production or money figures for Venezuela; Continental gives resources in place, with no investment amount.

What is being assembled

Taken together, the pieces sketch a mosaic: mid-sized operators rehabilitating old fields with money that comes in by changing owners, Gulf state and private capital in gas that looks toward Trinidad, and a power grid that still depends on the state and on whatever each operator can generate in its own field. TotalEnergies, the large oil company returning after giving up its 30% of Petrocedeño in 2021, is still at the memorandum stage.

For an investor, the useful question becomes: with which counterparty is Venezuela opening up?

A mid-sized operator has a shorter balance sheet than a large oil company, capital that sometimes depends on a merger or a change of control, and contracts still awaiting approvals. The dates that will measure this are close. The Bare contract taking effect, which on the maximum timeline counted from September 2 falls in late December, the month in which GeoPark wants to start operating. Continental's definitive contract, promised as of September 16. And the US listing of KEO Energy, which its parent keeps as a goal even though the Lionheart combination was never signed. We mapped the private capital behind other entrants in the piece on who is buying Venezuela, and Primavera's vehicle in the one on its contract with PDVSA.