After seizing Maduro, Trump wants Venezuela's oil. He will face logistical and legal hurdles

U.S. President Donald Trump's plan to take control of Venezuela's oil industry and ask American companies to revitalize it after capturing leader Nicolas Maduro in a raid is likely to face many hurdles — logistically, legally and politically.

The dramatic seizure of the Maduros capped an intensive Trump administration pressure campaign on Venezuela’s autocratic leader and months of secret planning, resulting in the most assertive American action to achieve regime change since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Washington has indicted Maduro on narco-terrorism charges, but the Venezuelan government has said for months that Trump and the U.S. were seeking to take the country's vast natural resources.

Venezuela is known to have the world's largest proven crude oil reserves of approximately 303 billion barrels, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That's more than either Canada or Saudi Arabia, and accounts for roughly 17 per cent of all global oil reserves.

But even with those massive reserves, Venezuela has been producing less than 1 per cent of the world's crude oil supply.

Venezuela saw production steadily decline from the 3.5 million barrels per day pumped in 1999 to today's level of about a million barrels per day.

There are various reasons for the decline, and many roadblocks to overcome for Trump to fulfill his desire to export Venezuela's oil.

Heather Exner-Pirot, director of energy, natural resources and environment at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, told CBC News on Sunday that production in Venezuela has "atrophied" due to nationalization, mismanagement and corruption.

Venezuela has also been hit by heavy U.S. sanctions — first put in place in 2015 after it deemed Caracas a national security threat — including a total blockade recently imposed by Washington.

"The oil sector is going to take years, if not a decade or more, to come back," Roxanna Vigil, an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told CBC News on Saturday, adding it would take tens of billions of dollars to remedy.

There's also a brain drain of skilled workers in the sector after then-president Hugo Chavez fired thousands of workers from the state-owned Petroleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA) in reaction to a 2003 strike.

"That's why we went to Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Canada, the U.S.," chemical engineer Lino Carrillo, who worked for PDVSA for 22 years, told CBC News.

Trump said Saturday he will allow "very large United states oil companies" into Venezuela, who he said will spend the necessary billions to "fix the badly broken infrastructure, and start making money for the country."

It's not just the infrastructure that's in "bad shape," said Francisco Monaldi, director of the Latin American energy program at Rice University in Texas.