Trump wants to own Venezuela’s oil, but its largest oil customer is speeding toward clean energy

By Ella Nilsen, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump wants the US to sell Venezuela’s oil. But who would buy it?

China has long been one of Venezuela’s biggest customers for oil. But its hunger for that oil is waning, as the country pulls off a stunningly fast transition to electric vehicles.

That transition means China’s oil imports likely won’t be seriously disrupted by the recent US military operation in Venezuela and Trump’s push for American companies to revitalize the oil infrastructure there, experts told CNN. China will probably be able to procure the oil it needs from Russia or Iran.

But there’s little doubt on the long-term trajectory of China’s oil demand: Analysts say it will trend downward. Many have projected the country has either already reached ‘peak oil’ or will very soon.

As CNN has reported, the Trump administration has told Venezuela’s interim president Delcy Rodriguez the country must cut ties with China, Iran, Russia and Cuba, and agree to partner exclusively with the US on oil production. On Wednesday, Trump administration officials said the US would sell Venezuela’s oil.

In a statement to CNN, the Chinese foreign ministry called the business relationship between China and Venezuela “legitimate and in line with the interests of both sides.” The two countries’ cooperation “is unrelated to any third party, nor is it subject to third-party interference,” China’s foreign ministry added.

China’s oil diet matters. As the world’s biggest oil importer, what happens here has ripple effects across the global oil market.

Energy experts say this trend shows how sharply the US and China are diverging on the energy transition, with China sprinting far ahead on renewables and EVs, while the US doubles down on drilling oil at home and abroad.

Much of this has been driven by the transformation of China’s transportation sector from gas-powered vehicles to electric. China owns the EV market; of the 18.5 million electric vehicles sold globally last year, more than 11 million were sold in China, according to UK research firm Rho Motion.

“This is just very decisive; it’s not going to go back,” said Li Shuo, director of the China climate hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute. Compared to the start and stop rollout of electric vehicle policy in the US, EVs have become firmly entrenched in China.

And with the domestic market increasingly saturated with EVs, Chinese companies are looking to sell their cars elsewhere around the globe. Chinese company BYD — which recently upended Tesla as the world’s largest seller of EVs — exported a record number around the world this year, Rho Motion data shows.

“We are now seeing the China EV story being replicated in other parts of the world, and very interestingly, more so in the global south than the US and European countries,” Shuo said.

While oil demand from the country’s transportation sector has already peaked, other sectors including petrochemicals and jet fuel are projected to keep rising. About 400,000-500,000 barrels per day of Venezuelan oil flow to China, according to Janiv Shah, a vice president of commodity market research at Norwegian energy firm Rystad. Venezuela accounts for a small percentage of China’s overall oil imports.

“Any US intervention could force this number to drop dramatically as we see this move as a symbolic strike against China on the world scale,” Shah wrote in an email. But Shah added China will still have access to oil supplies from other countries. “Chinese refiners would likely pivot to other discounted sanctioned barrels from Iran and Russia.”

In other words, Venezuela needs China’s business more than China needs Venezuela, Shuo said.

“Venezuela is very much reliant on China as a market, there is no question about that,” he said.

And in the long-term, the US intervention in Venezuela could only reinforce China’s pursuit of energy independence — attempting to produce more of its own energy at home and break reliance on foreign sources of energy that can be disrupted.

As CNN reported last year, China was building 510 gigawatts of utility-scale solar and wind capacity, according to Global Energy Monitor, an addition to the eye-popping 1,400 gigawatts already online. China committed to building even more in September, vowing to increase deployed wind and solar to 3,600 gigawatts — six times as much as it had in 2020. The country is also building nuclear power plants and pursuing an aggressive program to get fusion energy up and running — a near-limitless source of clean energy.

China is racing toward the energy of the future, while the US incursion into Venezuela to pursue its oil demonstrates it is stuck in the energy of the past, Shuo said.

“The largest economy in the world is embracing a petrostate approach,” Shuo said. “It just reinforces this notion that the United States is increasingly going backward on the energy transition and on top of that, is very willing and able to deploy military forces to achieve that goal.”

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This story has been updated with additional information.