The Trump administration's plan to take a stake in tens of billions of barrels of Venezuelan oil reserves will hinge on a private company called North American Blue Energy Partners, the White House announced Monday.
Page F4From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 1 September 2026
Pentagon expands into oil trading as Venezuela deal routes through firm called North American Blue Energy Partners.
As it ran on the front
I ran the filing against the table, hon, and here's what's there: the Pentagon is now involved in structuring a U.S.-Venezuela oil arrangement, and the operating partner named in that arrangement is a company called North American Blue Energy Partners. I checked. That's the name on the paperwork.
Nothing here says the Pentagon overpaid, or underpaid, or that the partner is unqualified — none of that is in front of me. What is in front of me is a category placed as routine: the Department of Defense, whose statutory business is defense, is now a party of interest in the extraction and movement of Venezuelan crude, through a firm with a name built out of three patriotic-sounding words and no operating history I could find in the time I had. Companies with names like that tend to be new. New isn't disqualifying. New next to 'Pentagon' and 'foreign oil' in the same sentence is just a gap I'm required to note.…
…(cont) Where the money question actually sits: when the department that runs the fighter jet program also starts running point on crude oil logistics, that's two budget lines learning to talk to each other that never used to, and every time two budget lines start talking, somebody has to account for the seam between them — whose authorization, whose oversight committee, whose line item this shows up under next fiscal year. I don't have that answer yet. I have the filing, and the filing says Pentagon, and it says oil, and it says a name I'd never heard before this week.
People ask me why this matters if the price at the pump doesn't move today. It's not about today. It's about who's now sitting at the table when Venezuelan oil gets priced, shipped, and sold, and whether that table has a defense budget or an energy budget attached to it, because those are different oversight rules, different classifications, different levels of what the public gets to see about a barrel of oil before it becomes a line on somebody's bill next winter. The gap doesn't close itself. Somebody reconciles it, or nobody does.
“Follow the acronym-soup company name far enough and it always leads back to somebody's business card in the building next to the Pentagon. When the people who run the fighter jet budget start running oil logistics too, that's not diversification, that's a second budget nobody voted on.”
“This is energy security, full stop — diversifying our partnerships, reducing reliance on hostile suppliers, that's the mission, and the operating partner's name is just a name, corporate entities are named all kinds of things, that's not — that's not a talking point I need to defend, actually, never mind.”
The receipts
The Defense Department’s Office of Strategic Capital, founded by the Biden administration to give loans to bolster the U.S. defense industry, is helping lead President Trump’s oil deal.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.