Texas oilman Rod Lewis has made millions drilling in places even other wildcatters find too dangerous.

But when he flew to Venezuela in 2024, he encountered an opportunity that was as treacherous—and possibly as profitable—as any in the world.

Lewis wasn’t daunted by the country’s political and legal landscape. A firm he backs cut a deal with the state-run oil company, making it one of the few North American companies with contracts to operate in Venezuela, but it has since been stumped by sanctions that forbid it from doing business there.

Now Nicolás Maduro is gone, and Lewis is in pole position to rush into the Latin American country with the world’s largest oil reserves. He isn’t one to move slowly.

“I have a need for speed,” he told Boat International magazine in a feature about his 78-meter yacht called the M5, which is said to be the world’s largest single-masted vessel. He said he flies a helicopter three days a week and a plane five, with a preference for his collection of vintage World War II aircraft.

While the Trump administration is pushing deep-pocketed firms such as Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips to wade into Venezuela, oil executives at a White House meeting on Friday said they needed security guarantees and an overhaul of Venezuela’s legal and commercial framework to consider diving in.

But fast-moving wildcatters, armed with private capital, are less cautious.

“I can tell you that the independent oil companies and the individuals—wildcatters, our phone’s ringing off the hook,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said at an event at the Economic Club of Minnesota. “They want to get to Venezuela yesterday.”

Lewis fits the bill, people who know him said. He is a nimble, private operator with a high tolerance for risk and a wealth of experience forged in unstable locales such as Mexico and Colombia.

“He’s actually a wildcatter,” said Conrad Gibbins, co-head of Upstream, Americas, at investment bank Jefferies. “He’s actually one of the few old-school guys in the industry that’s still around, still doing stuff.”

Other private drillers are also looking at Venezuela as a site for replacing aging domestic production. Harold Hamm, the billionaire founder of Continental Resources, said at the White House meeting that Venezuela has challenges but that he was excited by the prospect of exploring in the country. Some natural-gas magnates privately said they have looked at resources there in the past year but were waiting for President Trump’s signal.

Lewis, who is in his early 70s and is based in San Antonio, already has a foothold in Venezuela with LNG Energy Group, a Canadian firm and one of a small number of foreign companies to strike drilling deals with Venezuela’s state-run oil company Petróleos de Venezuela SA, or PdVSA, in the last two years. He is LNG Energy’s largest individual shareholder.

Lewis is closely following the situation in Venezuela and weighing a potential push through his privately held company, Lewis Energy Group, according to a person familiar with his thinking.

“It’s a life-changer, even for him,” the person said. “You get one block and it’s multiple times the resource of any Latin American country.”

Lewis didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Lewis isn’t well-known even in oil-and-gas circles. Unlike prominent wildcatters such as Hamm, he hasn’t made contributions to Trump’s presidential campaigns, filings show.

Growing up around Laredo in South Texas, Lewis didn’t set out to be an oilman. He studied criminal justice and went on to work on the family ranch.

He bought his first well in 1982 and started Lewis Energy. These were humble beginnings. He lived with his family in a mobile home. When new drilling and fracking techniques unleashed the shale boom, Lewis applied the techniques to gas-rich shale and, in time, built a small empire.

With his fortune, he bought Colorado’s Last Dollar Ranch, whose backdrop of snow-capped mountains has appeared in ads for Marlboro cigarettes, and which he sold in 2020 for $17 million. His ex-wife, Kimberly Lewis, is a minority owner of the San Antonio Spurs.

But Lewis’s ambitions went beyond Texas. In 2004, he signed a 15-year contract with Mexico’s state oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, to drill across the Rio Grande. It marked the first time in decades that a U.S. firm had been allowed to drill on Mexican land, according to Lewis Energy.

It was a bold bet. Lewis wouldn’t own the fuel he drilled for; he would merely provide his expertise to gas-starved Mexico and get paid in return. He had to front the drilling costs and contend with cartels roaming the border.

“I think we can make a lot of money—and I think we could make Mexico a hell of a lot of money,” he told Forbes in 2008.

Lewis painted “Pemex” on the sides of work vehicles and traveled with bodyguards. Employees at some drilling sites lived in a military-style compound and were forbidden from leaving after dark.

Lewis, who owns his own drilling rigs to keep costs low and avoid the yo-yo of service costs, said 10 years into the contract that he hadn’t found enough gas in Mexico to make the venture profitable. But in 2018, Lewis and Pemex announced they would team up to develop swaths of the Eagle Ford Shale, the fossil-fuel-rich formation that stretches across South Texas and into Mexico.

By then, he had also invested along the north coast of Colombia, where he built a domain of more than 360,000 gross acres. In 2023, he sold these properties for $100 million to a newly formed firm called LNG Energy. Lewis obtained about 43% of that company’s shares as part of the deal.

Just a few months later, Lewis made the trip to Caracas with other businessmen and met with Venezuelan officials, including those at PdVSA, according to a person familiar with his thinking. The visit was organized by oil magnate and GOP donor Harry Sargeant III, who has helped broker agreements aimed at deepening U.S. commercial engagement in Venezuela.

In April 2024, LNG Energy announced it had signed two contracts with a subsidiary of PdVSA to develop and operate fields in the northeast of the country. The fields covered by the contracts produced about 3,000 barrels of oil a day at the time but at peak production churned out about 120,000 barrels a day, according to LNG Energy.

That volume is equivalent to about 15% of Venezuela’s current crude production.

But American sanctions have kept the company on the sidelines. It has applied for, and has yet to receive, a specific license from the U.S. Treasury Department. The company is cautiously optimistic that, due to the evolving situation in Venezuela, it might obtain the license—or that sanctions will be relaxed, people close to LNG Energy said.

Dan Pickering, chief investment officer at financial services firm Pickering Energy Partners, said that even wildcatters have to feel comfortable they can do business in Venezuela before they can start pouring in capital. Their risk appetite, he said, will largely hinge on whether the Trump administration or a U.S.-friendly Venezuelan government can provide guarantees that contracts will be respected, production can reach markets, and money can be taken out of the country.

“Once you’re comfortable you can do business there, there are always a subset of wildcatters that are willing to go in and swing for the fences,” Pickering said.

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