Venezuela wants to produce more oil. The problem is how to get it out.

The White House just published concrete numbers around the U.S.-Venezuela deal. Reserves, concessions, governance, capital and buyers all seem to be folding into that same agreement. But underneath all that architecture, one question keeps showing up:

If the goal is to increase current production, where exactly are all those barrels going to go?

For a large portion of the oil in that document, especially the extra-heavy crude from the Orinoco Belt, the answer is José.

And José isn't simply a port that receives oil and loads it onto tankers. It's a gate that works in both directions. On one side, it receives the diluent that turns extra-heavy crude into a mixture that's not just transportable but commercially viable. On the other, it has to export the additional volume of crude that same diluent makes it possible to produce. The more the Belt grows, the more pressure it puts on both sides of that same system.

There's no other port waiting for those barrels. The Belt's fields are connected to a very specific chain. Extra-heavy production, dilution, processing, pipeline transport, storage in tanks, pumping to the docks, loading onto tankers. It all runs through José.

In western Venezuela there are alternatives, but they serve a completely different system. Bajo Grande and the Lake Maracaibo system handle Zulia crudes, with their own draft and navigation constraints. Amuay and Cardón are part of a system that primarily serves the Paraguaná refining complex. There's currently no pipeline that can move Orinoco Belt crude at scale toward those terminals when José fills up.

Guaraguao, near Puerto La Cruz, could relieve some of the flow. But it's not a direct replacement for the Belt's loading system. Right now only two of its seven berths are fully operational, and one space has been occupied by a vessel that's been sitting there for nearly two years.

Offshore Caribbean storage and ship-to-ship transfers can reorganize oil after it leaves Venezuela, but they don't increase the speed at which José can move crude from its tanks onto a ship.

For Orinoco Belt oil, José isn't an option. It's the only way out.

The current ceiling is operational

Venezuelan exports this year have found an operational ceiling of around 1.25 million barrels per day. But that number doesn't describe the design capacity of the system. When Venezuela was producing over 3 million barrels per day, its terminals were handling more than 2.5 million, and ships could arrive, load and depart in under a week. Right now some tankers are waiting up to 30 days around José and Pozuelos.

José has all the basic infrastructure. The tanks, berths, pumps, loading arms, pipelines and monobuoys can handle any of the large tankers. The problem is how long the system now needs to complete that operation.

PDVSA sources describe transfers from tanks to vessels as absurdly slow. When a ship arrives to discharge fuel or diluent, the process can take even longer because there isn't always enough available space around the receiving tanks. On top of that there are frequent power outages, equipment failures, quality and contamination issues, pump and hose limitations, and cargo scheduling that remains entirely under PDVSA's control.

The ship ends up occupying berth space longer than it should, while the next one waits.

The current ceiling is a combination of operational deterioration, deferred maintenance, power disruptions, storage limitations and coordination problems. The constraint isn't really engineering. It's a system that takes too long to convert inventory into a loaded ship ready to sail.

More barrels out require more barrels in

The complexity goes deeper because most Orinoco Belt crude can't be loaded directly as it comes out of the ground. It's genuinely heavy. It has to go through an upgrader or be blended with naphtha or a lighter crude to create products like Merey or diluted crude oil.

U.S. diluent imports into Venezuela have picked up this year. That diluent arrives at the same José complex and gets used to enable the crude that leaves. But diluent tankers also need a window to discharge, power to operate, available pumps and tank space. That naphtha then moves through the production and blending system and eventually comes back out incorporated into the crude, through the same port.

That creates an unusual dynamic that rarely shows up in production headlines. Getting more barrels out of the Belt first requires having the capacity to receive more barrels coming into the same port.

Frontier Grid's source pack estimates that an increase of 500,000 barrels per day of extra-heavy production could require roughly 125,000 to 170,000 additional barrels per day of diluent, depending on the blend. That's not just an upstream requirement. It's more inbound marine traffic, more occupied tanks and more competition for operational windows at the same terminal that then has to export the additional crude.

It's a bidirectional bottleneck. José doesn't just have to get more oil out. It has to be able to receive the input that makes producing it possible.

Recover José before building another port

The immediate conclusion probably isn't that Venezuela needs a new megaport.

An initial increase of around 100,000 barrels per day could likely be absorbed if the complex managed to reduce disruptions and increase loading speed. That means recovering pumps, arms and hoses. Securing power during operations. Returning tanks to service. Improving measurement and quality control. And better scheduling of inbound and outbound vessel windows. This comes down to maintenance and operational discipline before greenfield infrastructure.

A 250,000 barrel per day increase would be more demanding. It would require meaningful improvements: more usable storage, much more stable power, recovery of the Guaraguao berths to help relieve the flow from the east, and more consistent diluent blending and supply capacity.

A 500,000 barrel per day scenario is a different problem entirely. That requires larger-scale investment: new tanks, additional marine capacity, broad upgrader rehabilitation and probably another monobuoy or equivalent infrastructure.

But jumping straight to that phase may be an expensive way to avoid the underlying problem. First you have to recover the system that already exists. Then reduce the unnecessary bidirectional traffic running through José. Only after that does it make sense to evaluate what additional capacity is actually needed.

In that second stage another alternative appears: produce more diluent inside Venezuela, or genuinely recover upgrading capacity. Chevron is looking to develop something along those lines in Norte de Monagas, seeking a local source of light crude to manage its extra-heavy operations. It's still in project phase, but it points to the idea: reducing dependence on imported naphtha also reduces the inbound pressure on José. Every light barrel that doesn't need to arrive by ship frees up more than an import. It frees up tanks, power, time and coordination inside the same terminal.

More operators, same infrastructure

The new NABEP structure makes this question more urgent. The White House is talking about $100 billion in private investment and a material production expansion. NABEP has outlined a target of one million barrels per day, while other operators like Chevron, Eni, GeoPark and ONGC are also looking to expand. Each of these companies may have contracts, different offtake rights and their own financial structures. But all the barrels from eastern Venezuela are going to keep converging on the same infrastructure.

That means an improvement in one field can simply shift the bottleneck to José. It can also mean that new commercialization rights intensify competition for a loading window that PDVSA still controls.

The controversy around NABEP and Alejandro Betancourt has revolved around a different set of questions. Betancourt has been subject to investigations in multiple jurisdictions related to money laundering, though he has not been formally charged. Some international producers are also watching carefully a structure where the U.S. government itself would hold equity, preferential purchase rights and governance power inside a company that will compete for assets and opportunities with other players in the space.

The institutional architecture isn't fully closed either. Days before the fact sheet, a Pentagon official said the Office of Strategic Capital doesn't have authority to acquire equity stakes in private companies and that its role is limited to loans, guarantees and technical assistance. Washington subsequently published that OSC would receive 35% of NABEP's parent company.

A resolved legal and financial structure doesn't by itself increase the speed at which a barrel gets delivered. It doesn't return a tank to service or reduce the time a tanker spends at the dock.

For now that may define who controls the fields. It doesn't automatically resolve how the barrels move through the system.

Who pays for shared infrastructure?

The list of immediate repairs isn't really a mystery. It means reliable power at the port. Available pumps and loading arms. Tank capacity for crude and diluent. Better quality control. Operational berths. And substantially improved scheduling and coordination.

Much of the problem is who pays for it. José and Guaraguao remain under PDVSA control. PDVSA also manages cargo scheduling. The ones bearing the cost of the queues are Chevron, traders, refiners and new operators who need to monetize their production.

A Chevron investment in a pump or a tank could end up benefiting Vitol, NABEP, Repsol or any other terminal user. A trader could finance a repair, but without control of the assets or priority guarantees, it's not clear how that investment gets recovered. NABEP may have upstream rights and preferential access to American buyers, but there's no José concession, no berth priority agreement and no structure assigning them responsibility for terminal rehabilitation.

There's also no evidence of an EPC contract to bring the complex back to its historical capacity. And that's the commercial dilemma at the core of this. All the infrastructure is shared. The cost can fall on one party. The benefit gets distributed among everyone.

And in the meantime, the operator of the system, PDVSA, keeps controlling port scheduling.

Before capital moves, someone has to build a mechanism that connects investment with return. Right now that architecture isn't defined.

The first phase is recovery

The promise of Venezuelan oil is currently organized around reserves, contracts and production. But the next barrels aren't going to come out because 65 billion barrels exist underground. They're going to come out when José can receive diluent, process inventory, load ships and clear space fast enough.

The first phase isn't building another terminal. It's recovering what already exists.

The second is reducing the bidirectional dependency. More local production of light crudes, better upgrader performance, dedicated storage and less competition between what's coming in and what needs to go out.

Only then does a physical expansion make sense.

The next bottleneck isn't simply at the port. It's in a system where some of the oil has to come in before it can go out.

And it's still not clear who's supposed to end up paying to fix it.