First Argentina. Now Venezuela. Oklahoma City’s Continental Resources just expanded its international exploration efforts, signing a deal with Venezuela and prompting founder Harold Hamm to say the deal takes the company “to an entirely new level.”
The company on Wednesday signed a memorandum of understanding with Venezuela’s state oil company PDVSA on Wednesday to operate and develop the Ayacucho 2 Block in the Orinoco Belt, the company announced, with an estimated 30 billion barrels of resource in place across roughly 126,000 acres in Anzoátegui state. The deal was announced on Bloomberg TV.
The two sides intend to advance a long-term Contrato de Participación Productiva agreement in the coming weeks; once it’s signed, Continental will operate the block with a 100% working interest, reported OilPrice.com.
The Continental deal followed President Trump’s urging of American energy companies to help rebuild Venezuela’s oil industry after the U.S. capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January. Continental CEO Doug Lawler said Ayachucho 2 was “one of the most significant resource opportunities” in the nearly 60-year history of the Oklahoma-based company headquartered in downtown Oklahoma City, according to a report by Fox Business News.
Continental is the world’s largest privately held oil and gas producer and it holds core U.S. positions in the Bakken, Anadarko, Powder River and Permian basins, also recently expanding into Argentina’s Vaca Muerta shale and a joint venture in Turkey’s Diyarbakir Basin. Ayacucho 2 is its first foray into Venezuela.
Late last year, Continental’s Hamm visited Argentinian leaders and eventually signed a deal in January 2026 to begin exploration in that country’s Vaca Muerta play.
Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven crude reserves, but produced just 0.8% of global crude output that year, 742,000 barrels a day, a 70% decline from 2013 levels. Extracting the country’s mostly extra-heavy Orinoco crude requires technical expertise international oil companies possess but have been largely barred from deploying under years of U.S. sanctions.
