A tanker meandering in the Caribbean near Venezuela underscores the steep hurdles to ramping up the country’s oil production following the U.S. capture of President Nicolás Maduro.

The Sea Maverick, which has been linked to the so-called dark fleet of tankers carrying sanctioned Russian oil, has been circling near the Venezuelan coast since early January, after the U.S. intensified a blockade of the country, according to analytics firm Vortexa. It’s carrying about 380,000 barrels of naphtha, a petroleum product Venezuela needs to thin out its thick, sludgy crude so it can flow through pipelines for export. 

The Sea Maverick’s odds of unloading have shrunk further after Maduro’s capture. In an interview with Fox Business Network on January 8, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum reaffirmed Washington’s intent to “knock Russia out of the Venezuelan oil market,” including by prohibiting the sale of Russian naphtha to Caracas. 

The ship’s predicament shows the ripple effects of U.S. moves to control more of Venezuela’s oil riches. Without access to Russian diluent, Venezuelan crude production is at risk — and it’s unclear how quickly the U.S. can fill the gap by delivering naphtha from the Gulf Coast. In the face of the blockade, the South American country already started to shut wells as it runs out of storage space for its oil.

Though Venezuela’s production has slumped after decades of underinvestment and economic isolation, U.S. President Donald Trump has said big oil companies will spend at least $100 billion to ramp up the country’s output. A shift to U.S. naphtha supply would allow Washington to expand its role in Venezuela’s oil sector while keeping Moscow’s influence in the Western hemisphere at bay. 

“The U.S. blockade has rather successfully deterred Russian naphtha from arriving in Venezuela,” said Samantha Hartke, Americas head of market analysis at Vortexa. “That’s the one success story it can claim.”

Last year, Russia was sending an average of roughly 30,000 barrels a day of naphtha to Venezuela, far more than any other country, Vortexa data shows. That has since fizzled to zero. More than half of Venezuela’s roughly 1 million barrels a day of oil production is pumped from its Orinoco Belt region, which yields heavy crude that must be diluted for export to countries including China, one of the top buyers of Venezuelan crude.

The U.S. has signaled that American supplies of light crude will replace Russian naphtha, though the details and timeline have yet to be determined. 

“U.S. diluent (light crude oil) will flow into Venezuela, as required, to mix, upgrade, and optimize the production and transport of Venezuela’s very heavy (high viscosity) crude oil,” the Energy Department said in a fact sheet released on January 7.

It was unclear which light crude the document referred to, with traders speculating it could mean naphtha, C5 — a light gasoline blendstock — or West Texas Light, a light, sweet crude from the Permian Basin.

The U.S. previously served as Venezuela’s dominant naphtha supplier. In 2018, just before the U.S. imposed significant sanctions on Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela SA, all of Caracas’s imports were from the U.S. Gulf Coast via trading houses including Reliance Industries Ltd., Citgo Petroleum Corp.’s LDC Supply Trading, Vitol Group and Trafigura. 

More recently, Chevron appears to have sent the diluent as part of a so-called cargo swap, where oil products replace cash as tax on Venezuelan crude. 

But U.S. President Donald Trump last year revoked a license for some energy companies, including Chevron Corp., to do work in the country, leading Venezuela to turn to Russia for naphtha supplies. Even after the license was reinstated, Caracas continued to source the diluent almost exclusively from Moscow, in an apparent effort to strengthen economic ties. 

A resumption of U.S. naphtha flows to Venezuela would allow producers to unload an excess of the product that has built up since the key South American market became out of reach. Stockpiles in the U.S. as of October 2025 were at the highest seasonal level since 2023, according to the Energy Information Administration.

“Without Venezuela, U.S. naphtha exports have really struggled,” Hartke said. The Energy Department’s language “seems to imply that the green light is now on, so we should be sending this stuff en masse.”