President Donald Trump has left little doubt about his plans for Venezuela’s oil: He wants it and he’s willing to do a lot to secure it, going as far as saying that the United States could reimburse oil companies for money they spend to rebuild the country’s aging infrastructure and jump-start production.

If only it were so simple.

Tapping Venezuela’s vast oil reserves will require a multiyear effort and billions of dollars of investment in an exceedingly complex geopolitical environment, experts and industry veterans said in interviews with NBC News.

And while it remains unclear just how much control the U.S. will actually have in Venezuela — Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have offered a range of answers in recent days — experts say it’s factors outside of anyone’s control that make Venezuela a very dangerous place to drill for oil.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Wednesday that he is talking to all the corporate players “that were in Venezuela, that are in Venezuela, that want to go into Venezuela.”

In those talks, Wright said, he is asking oil companies, “What are the necessary conditions it would take you to put billions of dollars in to develop fields and build infrastructure?”

Wright did not say whether any companies had agreed to either re-enter the country or expand current operations there.

On Friday, top executives from the three biggest American oil companies, Exxon Mobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips, are scheduled to meet with Trump at the White House, an administration official told NBC News on Wednesday. Wright is also expected to attend that meeting.

A spokesperson for Conoco told NBC News Wednesday that the company is “monitoring developments in Venezuela and their potential implications for global energy supply and stability. It would be premature to speculate on any future business activities or investments.”

Exxon and Chevron did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In recent days, a Chevron spokesperson has told NBC News that the company “remains focused on the safety and wellbeing of our employees, as well as the integrity of our assets. We continue to operate in full compliance with all relevant laws and regulations.”

A dangerous assignment

“The problem here is insurgency, terrorism and guerillas,” said Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and an expert in security affairs.

“There is no way you’re going to be able to send in the civilian contractors” who make up the core workforce for international oil operations, he said.

“Venezuela has the jungles of Vietnam and the mountains of Afghanistan.”

In an interview Monday with NBC News, Trump predicted that American companies could get expanded oil operations in Venezuela “up and running” in fewer than 18 months. Most experts put the timeline for expanding operations at a minimum of three to five years.

But any expansion of oil operations in Venezuela would put the workers on the ground in danger, regardless of how much political influence the U.S. has with the government in Caracas, said Douglas Farah, president of the national security consulting firm IBI Consultants.

Pushing into new territory “is the way you’re going to run into all the different armed groups that are outside of the capital, and outside, probably, the control of Delcy Rodriguez or whoever else may be holding influence in the region,” Farah said, referring to the interim president.

Groups such as the National Liberation Army (ELN) and Colombia’s FARC dissidents operate in the forested mountains that straddle Colombia and Venezuela.

“You’re looking at groups that have had decades of combat experience and decades of extraction of natural resources,” Farah said.

In addition to a long tradition of unregulated gold mining in the Orinoco region of western Venezuela, guerilla groups have more recently begun mining rare earth minerals like coltan.

Moreover, given the vast distances and the difficult terrain, oil infrastructure “is going to be very difficult to secure without a significant number of U.S. troops on the ground,” he said.

Trump said Monday that he would be willing to send U.S. forces into Venezuela if he felt Rodriguez and the remaining Maduro government “went against making Venezuela great again.”

Venezuelan officials have not responded directly to Trump’s comments about oil since deposed President Nicolás Maduro’s capture, nor has the country’s state-run oil company.

Questionable returns

Trump’s fixation on Venezuela’s oil and his potential willingness to deploy U.S. forces to secure it underscore how much petroleum remains a key cog in the international system.

As Trump has scaled back on renewable energy investments and advocated a “drill, baby, drill” movement to double down on oil and gas, the U.S. has leaned even harder into global petro-politics.

Yet, even beyond the immediate danger to employees that going into Venezuela would present for U.S. oil companies, experts said, the economic incentives that a company would typically need in order to justify such a risk-laden investment are absent here.

Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips have already lost billions of dollars’ worth of equipment and technology seized by the Venezuelan government in 2007.

That year, the government of then-President Hugo Chavez decreed that foreign oil companies could own no more than a 40% stake in any oil project in the country, with the rest held by a state-run oil company.

The only major U.S. firm to accept the terms was Chevron, which remains in Venezuela to this day.

Exxon and ConocoPhillips are still trying to recover some of the money they lost.

There’s also the problem of the specific type of oil Venezuela’s fields produce. Known as heavy, sour crude, the oil is thick like molasses and rich in sulphur.

This combination is terrible for equipment and pipelines, said Matt Randolph, an internationally recognized expert in oil and gas.

In Venezuela, “the oil is so corrosive, it eats metal,” he told NBC News.

“That’s why you need $100 billion in investments for infrastructure,” he said, “because as it sat there, it has just rotted away.”

The specific qualities of Venezuelan crude could also have an upside, however.

This type of oil is “particularly well-suited for U.S. Gulf Coast oil refineries,” longtime industry analyst John Kilduff told NBC News.

Trump himself has said his plan would require billions of dollars in investment up-front from the oil companies. “It’ll be a lot of money,” he said Monday. “A tremendous amount of money will have to be spent and the oil companies will spend it, and then they’ll get reimbursed by us or through revenue.”

But the promise of huge revenues is complicated by the reality of global oil prices.

Last year, both U.S. crude oil and internationally sourced Brent crude oil posted their largest annual price drops since 2020.

“Oil prices have to be significantly higher than they are now for production to grow in Venezuela,” Randolph said.

Meanwhile, in the years since Exxon and ConocoPhillips left Venezuela, U.S. oil companies have invested more than half a trillion dollars in extracting Canadian oil.

“Any increase in production of Venezuelan oil just drives down the value of Canadian oil,” Randolph said.

If U.S. oil companies were to return to Venezuela, he said, “they would be competing with themselves.”

They might also find they are subject to production quotas dictated by OPEC, the global organization of oil-producing nations. Venezuela is one of OPEC’s founding members.

“Do U.S. oil companies want to go down there and be dictated to how much they can produce by OPEC?” Randolph asked.

Farah, of IBI, said it was difficult to imagine circumstances that would make Venezuela an attractive option for an oil company.

“The broader question in Venezuela now is, given the quality of oil and how degraded their infrastructure is, who would want to go in to invest there, anyway?” he said.