resource

Lisbon, Portugal, September 17, 2026 (venezuelanalysis.com) – Continental Resources, a firm owned by billionaire and Trump donor Harold Hamm, struck a deal on Wednesday to exploit one of Venezuela’s largest oilfields.

Under the agreement with Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA, Continental will receive a long-term concession with “100 percent working interest” for the 500 square-kilometer Ayacucho 2 block in Venezuela’s Orinoco Oil Belt. The block contains an estimated 30 billion barrels of extra-heavy crude.

“Continental was built to recognize great resource opportunities and have the conviction to pursue them,” Hamm told Fox News, vowing that the deal would take his company to an “entirely new level.”

For her part, Venezuelan Acting President Delcy Rodríguez claimed that the agreement would “strengthen [Venezuelan] oil production” and “create opportunities for economic growth.”

Hamm and PDVSA Vice President Jovanny Martinez signed the contract in Houston on the sidelines of the G20 energy summit. Martínez and Oil Minister Paula Henao attended the conference to pitch investment opportunities in Venezuela’s oil and gas sector.

PDVSA had previously assigned the Ayacucho 2 block to Chinese private firm Anhui Guangda in 2025. However, no information on investments or output were publicly disclosed, while Venezuelan authorities have not justified rescinding the contract with Anhui.

US government-controlled corporation NABEP, which recently received long-term concessions to 17 major Venezuelan oilfields containing 65 billion barrels in reserves, will also take over projects formerly run by Chinese enterprises, including state-owned CNPC. Beijing has called for its investments and interests in Venezuela to be respected.

Hamm was one of the corporate executives present at the White House on January 9, when Trump announced that Washington would control Venezuela’s oil industry and called on Western majors to invest. Since the January 3 US attacks and kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro, the White House has managed the South American country’s crude export revenues.

The White House has also backed Venezuelan authorities’ pro-business overhaul of the energy sector while issuing sanctions exemptions to select US-aligned corporations. Chevron, Shell, and Eni are among the companies that have signed new contracts or renegotiated existing ones in recent months.

According to Bloomberg, ExxonMobil is in advanced talks to return to the Caribbean country after a litigious past. The energy giant is negotiating rights to four major oilfields in the Orinoco Oil Belt, two of which it previously owned before they were nationalized by former President Hugo Chávez.

In the 2000s, the Texas-based corporation refused to comply with reforms implemented to assert state sovereignty over the oil industry. ExxonMobil refused compensation offers and pursued international arbitration after its assets were nationalized. The company received an arbitration award significantly below its demands. 

ExxonMobil was additionally denounced repeatedly by Caracas after it spearheaded offshore drilling projects in the territorial waters of the disputed Essequibo Strip.

On Wednesday, Venezuelan authorities likewise inked a 20-year agreement with Florida-based Denarius Holding Group, controlled by Turkish energy group Çan2 Termik. Denarius is taking over the Petrokariña project in Anzoátegui state, which contains 10 oilfields producing a variety of crude types.

Heeney Capital receives gold mine concession

In parallel to its oil opening, Venezuelan authorities have also fast-tracked reforms opening the country’s mining sector to multinational corporations.

On Wednesday, New York-based Heeney Capital and commodities trader Mercuria Energy received a 30-year concession to operate the Chocó 10 mine in Bolívar State. The project holds considerable gold deposits and was run by Rusoro Mining in the 2000s before being nationalized by the Chávez government.

Heeney and Mercuria pledged US $1 billion in initial investment in the Chocó project. The two firms had struck a previous agreement with Caracas to purchase and trade Venezuelan minerals and other commodities.

One of Heeney’s co-founders, Sean Pi, signed the deal at the presidential palace in May and praised Trump’s “leadership” in defending US access to mining resources abroad. Pi has endorsed legislative initiatives deregulating and streamlining mining projects to bolster the US supply of critical minerals.

Under the trading agreement, Heeney and Mercuria are reportedly preparing to ship 15,000 metric tons of Venezuelan aluminum to the US. The corporate partners are likewise seeking to take over VENALUM, Venezuela’s biggest aluminum smelter. Glencore, an Anglo-Swiss mining and trading multinational, is also interested in VENALUM, according to reports.

Venezuelan authorities have not commented on the negotiations for the aluminum smelter. In April, Rodríguez appointed a commission to evaluate privatization of “non-strategic” state assets.

The Trump administration has identified securing access to Venezuelan mineral riches as a key national interest and is reportedly preparing an executive order to boost US corporate participation in Venezuelan mining projects.

Edited by Lucas Koerner in Philadelphia, USA.

The Trump administration is proposing a dramatic overhaul of the once-a-decade U.S. Census head count that could leave out millions of immigrants based on status and key racial and ethnic data, jeopardizing the allocation of resources and the country’s voting map.

The potential changes, announced Wednesday, would exclude undocumented immigrants, asylum seekers and anyone without permanent status. Certain demographic questions from the traditional questionnaire would also be eliminated.

It echoes Trump’s previous idea to add a citizenship question to the 2030 census.

The U.S. Census Bureau, in a post on the Federal Register website, argued “illegal aliens (among others) should not be included in the apportionment count, as they are not true inhabitants, members of the body politic, or persons with a ‘usual residence’ in the United States due to their lack of a sufficient tie and allegiance to the United States.”

The census also “should be colorblind and should not be distorted in any way by questions about immaterial personal characteristics, such as race,” the agency said. It also is considering nixing questions related to people who identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community.

These changes would harm the quality of the data, said Beth Jarosz, a data researcher and vice president of the Association of Public Data Users. She called the proposals “unprecedented.”

“Not counting all of the people who reside here is actually where the real threat is,” Jarosz said. “If you think about all of the ways that census data are used.”

Census figures are traditionally used for an “apportionment count” to determine how many seats each state will have in the U.S. House of Representatives. That count also determines the number of votes in the Electoral College.

“You can imagine if we have undercounts or if we have people counted in the wrong place,” Jarosz said. “Then their political power or their political representation gets diluted.”

Immigrants of every status have historically been counted

Historically, the decennial census has not sought to conduct a full count of people by citizenship status, she added. It may come up in the Census’ periodic American Community Survey.

Getting an accurate count of immigrants of various statuses is useful when assigning resources for public health emergencies or natural or human-made disasters.

“If you don’t have a count of everyone who’s there, you’re not going to have the resources you need,” Jarosz said. “And that puts everybody at risk.”

Why race and ethnicity census data matters

Race-related questions have been on the once-a-decade census since 1790. Starting in 2000, the U.S. census began allowing people to identify by more than one race. A 2015 Pew Research Center study found that multiracial people in the U.S. were growing at a rate three times faster than the general population. By 2020, 33.8 million people in the U.S. identified as being more than one race, according to the census.

Race and ethnicity data is essential for researchers who gauge discrimination, crime rates and wealth gaps in communities of color.

Manjusha Kulkarni is co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate and executive director of AAPI Equity Alliance, two advocacy groups that rely on census counts of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. The proposed changes would have tremendous impact on the populations they serve, she said.

“It also seeks to exclude important demographic data from millions that enables lawmakers, health care providers, public safety officials and community advocates — really anyone who cares about the health, safety and well-being of all Americans — from having the necessary data to keep us safe and healthy,” Kulkarni said via text message.

Dropping race and ethnicity data as well as some immigrants sends a message that these communities don’t matter, she added.

Collecting data for the 2030 Census with all these missing elements would be detrimental, Jarosz said.

“These changes are like trying to land an airplane when you are in thick fog and someone has thrown paint across the front window and your instruments are also not working,” she said.

Tang writes for the Associated Press.