Trump donor Harold Hamm’s Continental signs a preliminary Venezuela oil deal

Harold Hamm, the shale oil pioneer and a close ally of President Donald Trump, announced that his company had signed a memorandum of understanding to invest in Venezuelan oil¹. Continental Resources signed the MOU with PDVSA, the Venezuelan state producer, for an oil block⁴. The deal was announced on Wednesday³.

The asset is large. Continental will develop the Ayacucho 2 field, which one account describes as containing 30 billion barrels². Doug Lawler, Continental’s president and chief executive, spoke to energy markets in the announcement, with Hamm named as founder and chairman emeritus⁴. Bloomberg had reported the company was set to announce the deal as the Trump administration pushed the opening⁵. The Wall Street Journal characterised it as a preliminary agreement⁷, and Reuters reported it alongside a separate arrangement for the US firm Heeney Capital to operate a Venezuelan gold mine⁶.

Why it matters to investors

This is policy, not just a transaction. Energy Secretary Chris Wright called it “a milestone deal in making the Western Hemisphere the center of the global energy system”¹⁰. Wright had travelled to Caracas on a one-day trip on September 1 to discuss the deals that US and other oil companies were weighing¹¹, and Continental says the decision followed eight months of evaluation¹¹.

Continental is not the only one moving. Exxon is nearing a Venezuela deal two decades after a messy exit, a step that could help revamp production in what Semafor called a de facto US protectorate¹². Hamm has been a major donor to Trump’s campaigns⁹, and the Financial Times noted a former Trump energy official now works as a vice-president of policy at another firm in the same orbit⁸, which is the reason the deals are being read as a political map as much as a commercial one^1,3.

What to watch

A memorandum of understanding is not a barrel of production. Every account so far describes the agreement as preliminary^1,7, and the gap between signing and first oil in a field of this size is measured in years, not quarters.

The second thing to watch is the fiscal and legal frame around it. Reuters covered the announcement in the context of a Senate energy hearing on the administration’s 2027 budget request⁶, and Mother Jones has already framed the wider set of agreements as Trump’s friends signing deals to take Venezuela’s oil¹⁰. Congressional scrutiny of where Venezuelan revenue goes is the near-term risk to the timetable, not the geology⁹.