Chevron, the oil giant founded and until recently headquartered in California, is the only foreign petroleum company still operating in Venezuela and its largest foreign investor.

Whatever you call President Trump’s stunning military intervention in Venezuela over the weekend, one company with deep California ties stands to benefit: Chevron.

That’s because Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves on the planet and Chevron — the international petroleum conglomerate with a massive refinery in El Segundo and headquartered, until recently, in San Ramon — is the only foreign oil company that has continued operating in Venezuela through decades of socialist revolution.

Other major oil companies, including ConocoPhillips and Exxon Mobil, pulled out of Venezuela in 2007 when then-President Hugo Chávez required them to surrender majority ownership of their operations to the country’s state-controlled oil company, PDVSA.

But Chevron remained, playing the “long game,” according to industry analysts, hoping to someday resume reaping big profits from the investments the company started making there almost a century ago.

At his news conference Saturday, after U.S. special operations forces snatched Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife in Caracas and extradited them to face drug-trafficking charges in New York, President Trump said the U.S. would “run” Venezuela and open more of its massive oil reserves to American corporations.

Chevron, which is a direct descendant of a small oil company founded in Southern California in the 1870s, has grown into a $300-billion global corporation. It was headquartered in San Ramon, just outside San Francisco, until executives announced in August 2024 that they were fleeing high-cost California for Houston.

Texas’ relatively low taxes and light regulation have been a beacon for many California companies, and most of Chevron’s competitors are based there.

Whereas other companies fled Venezuela and filed grievances with international governing bodies — essentially suing in an attempt to recover their seized assets — Chevron stayed and made a series of deals with the Chavez and Maduro governments.

The company has also made deals with the Trump and Biden administrations to secure licenses to continue operations in Venezuela despite U.S. sanctions.

By the latest published figures, Chevron is now in a 39%-61% revenue split with the Venezuelan government on the oil produced by its largest project in the country. But Chevron’s take is actually far lower than that when you factor in other taxes and royalties tacked on by Maduro’s government.

If Chevron could get a better deal after the U.S. military intervention — maybe a 50-50 split with lower taxes and fees — it could easily double its return, Mahdavi said.

Stumping for a second term in office in 2024, Trump met with some of the nation’s top oil executives and told them if they raised $1 billion for his campaign, he would relax environmental regulations and take other steps to help their businesses, according to the Washington Post, which first reported the candidate’s remarks. Executives from Chevron and Exxon were among those who reportedly attended the gathering.