The Wall Street Journal reports:

President Trump and his advisers are planning a sweeping initiative to dominate the Venezuelan oil industry for years to come, and the president has told aides he believes his efforts could help lower oil prices to his favored level of $50 a barrel, according to people familiar with the matter.

A plan under consideration envisions the U.S. exerting some control over Venezuela’s state-run oil company Petróleos de Venezuela SA, or PdVSA, including acquiring and marketing the bulk of the company’s oil production, people familiar with the matter said.

If successful, the plan could effectively give the U.S. stewardship of most of the oil reserves in the Western Hemisphere, when factoring in deposits in the U.S. and other countries where U.S. companies control production. It could also fulfill two of the administrations’ primary goals: to box Russia and China out of Venezuela and to push energy prices lower for U.S. consumers.

Trump has repeatedly raised the prospect of lowering oil prices to $50 a barrel, his preferred level, two senior administration officials said.

But oil prices are already low, with the U.S. benchmark hovering around $56 a barrel Wednesday, and Trump has struggled to persuade U.S. oil-and-gas producers to crank out more crude and help him accomplish his political goals. Many companies see $50 a barrel as a threshold below which it becomes unprofitable to drill, and a sustained period of low oil prices could decimate the U.S. shale industry, which has been a key backer of the president. [Continue reading…]