United States Secretary of Energy Chris Wright on Wednesday announced that the United States plans to exert long-term control over Venezuela’s oil industry, including overseeing its sale “indefinitely.” 

Speaking to Goldman Sachs’s annual energy banking conference in Miami, Wright said  that the United States will sell Venezuela’s ongoing production on the global market, emphasizing its use as leverage to “drive the changes that simply must happen in Venezuela.” Executives from Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and ExxonMobil, were slated to attend the conference and hold direct meetings with Wright to discuss future investments. 

“I’m working directly in cooperation with the Venezuelans,” Wright, a former oil executive, told the audience. “We are going to get that crude moving again and sell it,” starting with “backed-up, stored oil.”

His remarks follow President Donald Trump’s separate announcement on Truth Social, posted late Tuesday evening, that interim authorities in Venezuela will turn over “between 30 and 50 million barrels of high-quality, sanctioned oil to the United States.” Trump said last Friday that American oil companies will spend billions of dollars to repair Venezuela’s oil infrastructure.