Canadian oil tycoon, private equity energy investor and executive chairman of Strathcona Resources, Adam Waterous in Calgary on Nov. 20, 2025.Todd Korol/Reuters
Canadian oil tycoon Adam Waterous says building a new pipeline to the B.C. coast to expand access to overseas markets is now even more urgent, given U.S. President Donald Trump’s vow to get Venezuela’s crude pumping with the help of billions of dollars invested by American oil majors.
Prime Minister Mark Carney has promised two-year approvals for major nation-building projects such as pipelines, but that needs to be trimmed to three months or less to remain competitive, says Mr. Waterous, the chief executive of Waterous Energy Fund and executive chairman of oil producer Strathcona Resources Ltd. SCR-T
A new pipeline is no longer about growing the oil and gas sector, Mr. Waterous said in an interview, it’s about preventing industry contraction when more Venezuelan oil eventually enters the market.
The potential for a shifting tide in Venezuelan oil comes after U.S. forces captured President Nicolás Maduro and his wife in a military raid at the weekend. On Sunday, Mr. Trump asserted that “we’re in charge” of the country and would bring in U.S. oil companies to take over energy infrastructure.
Given the Venezuelan industry’s state of disrepair, it could take several years, and perhaps as much as US$100-billion, for oil production to get back to the three million barrels a day (b/d) the country was producing in the late 1990s. U.S. oil majors have so far been silent on any plans to rebuild Venezuela’s oil industry.
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Around US$53-billion investment would be needed over the next 15 years just to keep Venezuela’s crude oil production flat at 1.1 million b/d, Rystad Energy said in an analysis Monday. It estimated that only 300,000 b/d of additional supply can be restored within the next two to three years with limited incremental spending.
Regardless, Mr. Waterous said Venezuelan supplies threaten to displace Canadian oil sands crude in the medium term. “We need to find new markets or our production will fall. So now, building a new pipeline is not to grow the business – it’s to avoid shrinking,” he said.
No longer can the federal government create a static regulatory environment where two-year approvals are set in stone “and it ignores what else is going on in the world,” he said.
“Whatever level of urgency there was to build a pipeline has now gone up, because … now it’s just protecting what we’ve got. That’s a very different dynamic.”
Mr. Waterous was one of 38 Canadian energy company heads who wrote to Mr. Carney days after the Liberal Leader clinched a victory in the April election, laying out their asks for the sector.
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One of those was a six-month approval timeline for major oil and gas projects; at the time, a schedule commensurate with the United States. But that country has deregulated even further over the past year, Mr. Waterous said, meaning Canada needs three-month approvals to remain competitive. And that may drop further given rapid changes in international markets, he said.
“The world is not static. We’re in a competition, we’re in a race for dollars and our competitor is not standing still,” he said.
Stephen Legault, senior manager of the Alberta Energy Transition at Environmental Defence, countered that the global transition to clean energy is well under way and accelerating rapidly, negating the need for any new oil pipeline from Alberta to Canada’s West Coast.
“If the oil and gas industry is not interested in investing in more production capacity in Canada, why would they do so in Venezuela? They know what is coming and are focused on profit-taking while they still can,” he said in a statement.
According to Rystad, there is a “realistic technical pathway” for Venezuela to raise production to three million b/d, but it would take around 15 years.
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The firm’s base case scenario for the country from December, 2025, assumed continuous sanctions and blockade, which it estimated would see oil production decline gradually from 1.1 million b/d currently to 700,000 b/d in 2040.
“While we maintain our base case call for now, we may consider another scenario in which international oil companies develop full confidence in a stable investment climate and are offered reasonable incentives to commit capital to Venezuela’s oil sector,” it wrote.
However, in the current market environment, “it is hard to imagine what kind of measures could trigger this ‘full confidence’ sentiment,” it said.
Jim Burkhard, the global head of crude oil research at S&P Global Energy, said the developments in Venezuela do little to alter the fact that the global oil market is facing a surplus at the start of 2026.
“Whether Venezuela crude oil production grows after years of neglect is a question that will be answered over months and years, and only with significant levels of investment. For now, prevailing oil market fundamentals remain largely unchanged,” Mr. Burkhard said.
Given little expectation that Venezuelan oil could quickly return to markets in large volumes, the short-term price impact has been muted. U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate crude rose 1.8 per cent to US$58.37 a barrel on Monday, reflecting a glut in global supplies.
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However, investor fears about the potential impact on Canadian heavy crude sparked a selloff in the shares of the country’s major producers. The S&P/TSX Capped Energy Index fell 3.4 per cent on the day, with big names such as Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., Suncor Energy Inc., Imperial Oil Ltd. and Cenovus Energy Inc. all declining. Mr. Waterous’s Strathcona Resources fell more than 2 per cent.
In a report, analysts at TD Cowen laid out various scenarios for the impact on Canadian oil, specifically the heavy crude that both countries have in massive reserves. If Venezuela’s political and economic situation is normalized quickly, the impact on Canadian heavy crude would be negative. Assuming Venezuela’s production recovers in a year or two – which the bank sees as highly unlikely – the new supplies would compete directly with Alberta bitumen in the U.S. Gulf Coast region and discounts would widen sharply.
With a slower, messier resumption in output over several years, Canada could maintain its advantage as a secure and reliable supplier to the U.S., though price discounts would still widen to more historical levels below US$20 a barrel under West Texas Intermediate crude prices. It pegged that outcome at a 60-per-cent possibility.
With a political change but no major increase in Venezuela’s production, Canada’s oil price discount could hover in the recent favourable range, TD Cowen said, putting the chances of that at 25 per cent.
With “no durable transition” in power in Venezuela, and little improvement in output, Canada’s heavy oil producers would enjoy price advantages and investor confidence.