Ghostbusting On the High Seas

When there’s something strange in the oil tanker at sea, who’re you gonna call?

Ghostbusters!

Today, that means President Trump and his never-ending quest to tighten his grip on oil sanctions. 

And you can bet that busting makes him feel good.

The video looks like something out of a Cold War movie… a Coast Guard helicopter hovering over a rust-streaked tanker, special forces sliding down ropes onto a listing deck, and a ship that can’t quite decide what country it belongs to. 

That was the scene a few weeks back, when U.S. forces grabbed the VLCC Skipper off Venezuela’s coast, a so-called “ghost ship” long accused of spoofing its location and hauling sanctioned crude as part of the shadow fleet that moves oil for sanctioned regimes.

Once seized, the Skipper was soon escorted to the Houston Port.

Then earlier this week, U.S. forces chased down the Marinera in the North Atlantic.

This tanker had switched to a Russian flag after refusing boarding near the Caribbean, trying to pass itself off as Moscow’s business instead of Caracas’s. 

It didn’t work, and we quickly seized the vessel along with another Venezuela-linked tanker, the M Sophia, and rolled the operations into a broader campaign against what they now openly call a “shadow fleet” of sanctioned oil movers.

The message to shippers and traders is simple: there is no safe flag for Venezuelan barrels anymore. 

Even with Russian submarines lurking nearby and China denouncing “bullying,” President Trump has made it clear that moving Venezuelan crude outside his blessing is now a high-risk occupation.

For the record, this is what strict sanctions enforcement looks like — and that reality matters far more than the political show in front of the cameras. 

If you believe the easy narrative that Venezuela is about to “flood the market” and crush oil prices, you have to assume this dark-fleet clampdown doesn’t matter, that sanctions enforcement will quietly fade, and the hundreds of billions of barrels buried in the Orinoco belt will flow freely. 

But for Venezuela’s oil sector, the path to significantly bringing its heavy crude to market is no longer about creative shipping tricks. 

Going forward, it’ll come down to massive capital budgets, long-cycle projects, and a risk premium that still screams “not yet” to Big Oil.

The $183 Billion Oil Mirage

Look, I understand that on paper, Venezuela looks like a shortcut to cheap oil. 

Even if we trust that the 300 billion barrels the country holds in proven oil reserves is legit (spoiler: it may not be!), there’s far too much hype over production growth in the short-term.

You see, the output climb from here is where the fantasy starts to break from reality…

Rystad Energy’s latest deep dive pegs the bill for taking Venezuela back to 3 million barrels per day — roughly its late-1990s peak — would cost $183 billion and take around 15 years to achieve. 

That’s not a quick stimulus package, dear reader. It’s a 15-year spending marathon of pipelines, upgraders, and processing plants layered on top of upstream drilling. 

In their “back to 3 million bpd” scenario, output doesn’t even hit 2 million barrels per day until 2032, then finally hit that previous peak of 3 million barrels per day in 2040 — and that’s also assuming that Big Oil starts spending those billions of dollars in 2026.

Even the modest scenarios are expensive and slow, with some estimates calling for up to $54 billion through 2040 just to keep production flat!

A quicker push to 1.4 million barrels per day in under two years might be possible through workovers and basic repairs, but that alone would demand roughly $14 billion in fresh capital. 

Of course, pushing beyond 1.4 million barrels per day to 2 million requires another $41 billion or so.

Now let’s compare that to what the majors actually spend. 

In the early stages of development, Big Oil would have to commit roughly $35 billion to start that long journey back to peak production levels — roughly the equivalent of Exxon’s entire annual global capex.

Remember, that cash injection would go into an oil industry where infrastructure has decayed for years, contracts have been rewritten repeatedly, and the legality of the U.S. military’s removal of Nicolás Maduro is already being questioned in international law circles.

The Reality for Oil Prices in 2026

Put it all together and the timeline suddenly snaps into focus. 

President Trump has proven that he’s going to crack down on the shadow fleet of tankers moving Venezuelan, Russian, and Iranian crude to market. 

In fact, a 5th tanker linked to Venezuela was seized last Friday!

That’s 5 down, and 995 more ghost tankers to go. 

Even if everything goes right — financing, security, legal guarantees, midstream build-out — Venezuela might regain something close to its former glory by 2040. If anything goes wrong, the country’s oil output could stall out well below its late-1990s peak, permanently capped by underinvestment and political risk.

In the meantime, decline rates in the rest of the world, simmering geopolitical risk, and years of under-spending on new supply don’t go away just because politicians talk about “unlocking” the Orinoco. 

The dark fleet is being hunted, capital cycles are notoriously slow to move, and the barrels Wall Street is counting on from Caracas are more mirage than flood. 

For us, that points to an oil market that stays tighter than the headlines would have you believe — and a price floor that Venezuela, even at full throttle, may never fully erase.

P.S. Trump’s Tariff Windfall Is Turning Into Cash Checks — Did You Claim Yours?

Trump’s plan to slash — or even eliminate — income taxes is being quietly fueled by a surge in tariff revenue, with nearly $400 billion a year flowing in from foreign imports. A portion of that money is already being redirected into “Tariff Rebate Checks,” paying qualifying Americans up to $8,276 every quarter. The next payout window is approaching fast, and those who don’t act now risk watching their checks go to someone else.