In November, North American Blue Energy Partners’ (NABEP) in-country fleet will reach 41 of the 60 rigs announced earlier in October.
NABEP has nine drilling rigs, which bore new wells, in Venezuela. Three are active in the Junín 10 block of the Orinoco Belt, three more will start there soon, and three are being refurbished or moved into position. Four more are being shipped from Houston, Brazil and Colombia. Together, these rigs will open new production from NABEP’s heavy oil reserves. They include H&P and NOV models from US manufacturers.
The company also has 20 workover rigs in Venezuela, which repair existing wells and bring idle or underperforming wells back into production. Three of them are in Lake Maracaibo, 12 are in the Lagunillas and Bachaquero fields, and five are in the Orinoco Belt. Fifteen more are being refurbished in Houston for deployment in western Venezuela. All 35 are being recertified to Category 4, the most thorough level of rig inspection, before entering service.
This is NABEP’s second fleet update following the addition of 11 550-horsepower workover rigs and two 1500-hp drilling rigs in October. The buildout comes as production continues to climb. NABEP’s production reached 223 509 boe/day on 19 October, up from about 200 000 in August.
“We are paying for every one of these rigs with the oil we produce. It’s the same reinvestment strategy we used to successfully grow production tenfold in two years,” said NABEP CEO Alejandro Betancourt. “NABEP is committed to injecting unprecedented capital into Venezuela’s long-neglected oil industry and in doing so, breathing new life into the Venezuelan economy. We’re concurrently planning and investing in shovel-ready brown fields to the most challenging green fields, and no company is better suited for the job at hand than one born right here at home, powered by Venezuelan workers.”
The new equipment follows the August 2026 agreement between NABEP and the US Departments of State and War to significantly expand oil production in Venezuela. The first million barrels of oil under that agreement arrived in Corpus Christi, Texas on 27 October.
The company employs 5000 people and supports 10000 contract employees in Venezuela. NABEP has scaled its production from approximately 18 000 bpd to more than 200 000 in two years through roughly US$1 billion in company-funded investment. The same strategy is being used to fund its ongoing production push, with hundreds of millions of dollars more being reinvested every month.
NABEP controls the rights to commercialize more than 65 billion bbl of P1 oil reserves in Venezuela and plans to invest nearly US$100 billion to increase production capacity and improve oil-and-gas infrastructure. NABEP is rapidly expanding its operations in Lake Maracaibo and the Orinoco Belt. Its near-term goal is to increase production to more than 1 million bpd.
