$100 billion to revive Venezuela’s energy industry? Oil executives are not so sure.

By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN, BRIAN O’KEEFE, BERNHARD WARNER, SARAH KESSLER, MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED and NIKO GALLOGLY

Exxon Mobil has a long history of drilling in challenging environments. The largest U.S. oil company will go almost anywhere to extract hydrocarbons if it can manage the risk and make the numbers work. Exxon pumps crude in the deep water off the coast of Guyana and has invested some $19 billion to produce natural gas on the island nation of Papua New Guinea.

But at a highly staged meeting of oil executives called by President Donald Trump at the White House on Friday, Exxon CEO Darren Woods was direct in highlighting the hurdles his company would face in returning to Venezuela, where it has been burned before.

“We’ve had our assets seized there twice, and so you can imagine to reenter a third time would require some pretty significant changes,” Woods said at the White House meeting, as Susie Wiles, the chief of staff, sat next to him.

“Today it’s uninvestable,” he added.

Trump summoned the executives to hash out details of his plan to take charge of the Venezuelan oil industry. But the reaction of Woods and other leaders at the event suggested that getting buy-in from the industry for such a costly and potentially risky endeavor might not be as straightforward as the White House had hoped.

In the days since U.S. military forces entered Venezuela and captured the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, Trump has asserted that the U.S. will run the country and its oil industry for years. He added that he wanted to use the country’s vast oil reserves to drive the price of oil down to $50 per barrel.

The president emphasized that he expected the oil companies to foot the bill for the project, and he has a big number in mind.

“The plan is for them to spend — meaning our giant oil companies — will be spending at least $100 billion of their money, not the government’s money,” Trump told reporters. The government, he said, could provide protection and security.

Woods wasn’t the only executive at the meeting to appear wary of the plan. At one point, Harold Hamm, an Oklahoma oil tycoon and one of the president’s closest allies, offered a carefully calibrated answer that stopped short of endorsing his plan.

“It excites me as an explorationist,” he said. “Everybody has that in their blood.” But, he added, Venezuela has “its challenges.”

Trump, who was wearing a “happy Trump” pin, also had a lively exchange with Ryan Lance, the ConocoPhillips CEO, regarding the $12 billion in claims the company is pursuing against Venezuela. The president, however, showed little interest in addressing such concerns, saying, “We’re not going to look at what people lost in the past.” He jokingly suggested that such losses could be written off on the companies’ taxes.

“It’s already been written off,” Lance replied somewhat tersely.

And after Mark Nelson, the vice chair of Chevron, spoke, Trump made what sounded like a threat.

“If we make a deal, you will be there a long time,” he said, without naming Chevron or any other oil company. “If we don’t make a deal, you won’t be there at all.”

The meeting succeeded in creating a spectacle. In addition to the executives, the room was crowded with members of the media, including Tucker Carlson, who has been critical of the administration’s interventions in Venezuela. (The far-right activist Laura Loomer, in turn, was critical about Carlson’s appearance, writing on social media that it was “terrible optics for the Trump admin in a midterm year.”) At one point, Trump paused the discussion to stand up and look out the window at the progress of the White House ballroom being built. (“Wow. What a view.”)

The number of hard commitments the president was able to extract from the executives was less clear. But Trump appeared confident when talking to reporters after the meeting.

“We sort of formed a deal,” he said. “They’re going to be going in with hundreds of billions of dollars in drilling oil, and it’s good for Venezuela and it’s great for the United States.”