LatinNews Daily - 18 February 2026

*US Energy Secretary Chris Wright has said that Venezuelan oil exports are expected to total over US$10bn per year now that the US has assumed de facto control of the oil sector. Wright said on US news channel Fox News that “we’ve sold about US$1bn of oil so far, we’ve recently signed agreements to sell about another US$5bn worth of oil in the next several months, so you’re talking well north of US$10bn a year”. He said that “this is enormous revenue to start to rebuild a country and a society, re-establish a free press and a representative government, and bring a specific kind of crude that American refineries were built to run on in the 1970s”. Wright also said yesterday that he expects Venezuelan crude production, which is currently under 1m barrels per day (bpd), to rise by “several hundred thousand barrels a day” by the end of this year. Speaking during an event at the Paris-based think tank Institut Français des Relations Internationales, he added that “world oil demand grows by about a million barrels a day per year, so it could be that 30 or 40% of incremental oil demand this year will come from one country, from Venezuela”.