By Irina Slav – Dec 21, 2025, 4:00 PM CST
- U.S. pressure on Venezuela is disrupting oil exports, with tankers diverting, crude piling up at sea, and PDVSA facing imminent well shut-ins due to shrinking storage capacity.
- The clampdown threatens up to $8 billion in oil revenues.
- Global markets remain largely insulated for now, but analysts warn prolonged disruption could deepen Venezuela’s output losses.
Oil tankers are diverting from their route to Venezuela; some are sitting idle at ports instead of setting off for Asia; discounts on Venezuelan crude are deepening; and PDVSA may soon start shutting down wells for lack of storage space. President Trump’s military campaign against Venezuela is threatening an $8-billion market.
It started with one tanker seizure, a week ago. Then Trump escalated the rhetoric, threatening a blockade on Venezuelan tanker traffic and demanding that Venezuela returned “Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us,” most likely referring to oil assets nationalized by the Hugo Chavez government back in the 90s. The U.S. president also wrote on his social network that U.S. military presence off the Venezuelan coast would “only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before.”
In response, Venezuela assigned Navy escort to oil tankers, with several vessels setting off this week, hours after President Trump issued his latest threats, carrying urea, petroleum coke, and other petroleum by-products, according to the New York Times, which cited ship-tracking data and unnamed sources.
According to the Wall Street Journal, however, as many as 75 tankers are idling off the Venezuelan coast, even though only half of these are on the U.S. sanction list, per data from TankerTrackers.com. Some, as mentioned already, have turned away from their original course to Venezuela to avoid seizure. According to one Venezuelan economist that the Wall Street Journal cited, the clampdown on sanctioned tankers could cost Venezuela $8 billion in oil revenues.
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Sanctioned tankers, which media like to call “shadow fleet” because they use different tactics to either conceal the origin of the crude or their location at any given time, account for as much as 70% of Venezuelan oil trade, the WSJ report noted. In absolute numbers, the tanker fleet carrying Venezuelan crude abroad—mainly to Asia—stands at some 900 vessels.
These vessels employ moves first tested by Iran, after Trump reinstated U.S. sanctions on Tehran during his first term. Ship-to-ship transfers at sea are one such move to avoid sanctions; sailing under a false flag is another. Turning off transponders to conceal locations is also a tactic used by sanctioned vessels to avoid detection. However, with the U.S. Navy right off the Venezuelan coast, all of this has become more difficult—and so has trade in Venezuelan crude.
The International Energy Agency estimated Venezuela’s oil production at 860,000 barrels per day last month.