Venezuela's minerals: huge potential, even bigger risk

If this scenario were to gain traction, it would mean something more important than day-to-day politics: the return of a question that has been dormant for years — whether Venezuela could become a real component of Western supply chains. Industrial ones. Ones tied to electronics, energy, and digital infrastructure.

And these conversations are not hypothetical. In early January, the White House convened a meeting with the CEOs of major US energy companies, asking directly about a potential return to Venezuela and future investments — something Reuters reported on repeatedly. This is not a distant fantasy. The question was put on the table: if the political landscape shifts, could Venezuela once again become a place worth deploying capital?

That is exactly why the resources angle is back — with force. Venezuela is not a “single-commodity country.” Beyond oil, it holds a broad portfolio of deposits that matter to industry and technology. Think bauxite (and therefore aluminium), iron ore, gold, and materials increasingly described as “strategic” or “critical” — including coltan, potentially linked to tantalum and niobium. On paper, that basket alone would be enough to pull in market attention, and the electronics sector. Except in Venezuela, geology is only the first chapter. The second begins where the charts end. With people, power, and the question of who gets to call a resource “legal”.

Resources aren’t just geology. They’re governance

Venezuela is a country where the real map of control is far more complex than official structures would suggest. In January 2026, the Financial Times described a local mosaic of armed and paramilitary actors — including colectivos, state-linked groups, and criminal networks — that shape order on the ground, especially in peripheral regions where resources are a source of income, influence, and violence.

This context matters because for global companies today, the key question is not only whether a resource exists, but whether it can be sourced legally, consistently, and without reputational fallout. In other words: can it enter a supply chain without the risk that, a year from now, someone asks not “how much,” but “where from?”

Venezuela on paper and in reality: production data

In January 2026, Reuters pointed to yet another paradox: Venezuela’s real output is simply small compared with its potential. The country has resources, but it does not have an efficient, predictable mining sector. And this is not one single bottleneck. It is the result of years of infrastructure degradation, capital flight, the struggle to keep state-run companies operational, and conditions that have proven highly effective at scaring investors away.

The most striking figures Reuters cited — based on USGS data — tell the story clearly: bauxite output in 2021 stood at 250,000 tonnes (down from 550,000 tonnes in 2017). Iron ore production in 2021 was around 1.41 million tonnes (Fe content). Gold production in 2021 was roughly 480 kilograms.

These are not the numbers of a country building global relevance as a supplier. They are the numbers of a “production collapse” in a place that, on paper, should be a resource powerhouse.

Interestingly, a similar tone — less journalistic, more industrial — appears in the USGS Minerals Yearbook 2019. It stresses that Venezuela’s mining sector remained constrained by the economic crisis, lack of investment, and operational problems, and that production across multiple commodities was insufficient to support stable exports.

And this is the core point: Venezuela is not a “resource asset” in the market sense today. It is a political asset. Which means its resources can suddenly come back into play, and just as quickly drop out of it.

Resource overview: what can Venezuela offer the electronics industry?

If we strip away the political noise and leave only the resources, Venezuela is holding four cards that genuinely matter to industry: bauxite (and therefore aluminium), iron ore, gold, and critical minerals, including coltan.

• Bauxite and aluminium: the “ordinary” metal of modernity

Aluminium is one of the pillars of the technological world — even if it rarely shows up in public debates about “strategic resources.” It sits in casings. Heat sinks. Structural frames. But it also sits in the background: energy grids, transport systems, data centres. Without aluminium, modern infrastructure simply doesn’t work.

In theory, Venezuela could play in this league.

In practice, it doesn’t. USGS data cited by Reuters show bauxite production falling from 550,000 tonnes in 2017 to 250,000 tonnes in 2021. That drop tells a larger story: the country has struggled to maintain stable extraction at industrial scale.

For the industry, the takeaway is clear. Venezuela is not a source of aluminium that will “fix” any global supply problem. It is something else: a country where the resource exists, but fails to function as a predictable industrial lever.

• Iron ore: a hard resource, not “high-tech” and that’s the point

If electronics is the nervous system of civilisation, iron and steel are the skeleton. Let’s say it plainly: without steel and iron there would be no factories, machines, tools, transmission infrastructure, logistics, transport, or industrial construction.

So yes, iron doesn’t sound like a “critical mineral.” But in the real economy, it is absolutely critical.

USGS data suggest that in 2021 Venezuela produced roughly 1.41 million tonnes of iron ore (Fe content—meaning the amount of pure Fe contained in the ore, rather than the total mass of the mined rock). For a country with Venezuela’s potential, that is a low number. To put it into perspective: in Sweden—one of Europe’s key iron ore producers—state-owned LKAB reported around 26.7 million tonnes of iron ore production in 2021. A completely different order of magnitude.

And again: this is not about iron “running out.” It’s about infrastructure and the state failing to operate. Once that happens, supply doesn’t weaken. It stops.

• Gold: a resource that, in Venezuela, functions above all as a currency of power

Gold does have a technological role in electronics. But in Venezuela, a different meaning matters far more: gold as a mechanism of financing and control.

The USGS Minerals Yearbook 2019 includes a detail that neatly supports the narrative of gold as a strategic asset: according to the government, the country has 32 certified gold deposits.

On the surface, it’s an innocent sentence. In Venezuela, it carries weight. Because it signals something very specific: the state wants to show the world it is not a country of random extraction, but a country of deposits that can be formally “counted.” The problem is that formalisation and real control are two very different things.

Back in 2020, CSIS was already describing the scale of environmental devastation and humanitarian risks in the country’s southern regions linked to illegal mining.

This is where the issue that now defines the discussion comes into focus: label risk. For many technology companies, the risk of being associated with a resource tied to violence, illegal practices, environmental destruction, or human rights abuses is simply too high. Even if the material were cheap, the savings could come with a price tag that arrives later and is far more expensive.

• Critical minerals and the Orinoco Mining Arc

In electronics supply chain debates, coltan, tantalum, or niobium are not niche topics. They are keywords for a simple reason: they map directly onto industrial use. Tantalum is a key material for capacitors (especially where small size and high reliability matter). Niobium, in turn, plays an important role in advanced alloys and industrial-grade materials. That is why Venezuela keeps resurfacing as a potential diversification option—particularly when geopolitics pushes markets to look for alternatives.

Except that in 2026 the Orinoco Mining Arc — an extraction zone in the southern part of the country — does not look like a “new destination.” It looks like a warning.

CSIS noted in January 2026 that in practice the region operates as a space of informal and illegal mining, linked to violence and criminal networks. In that configuration, a resource stops being just a resource. It becomes part of a local power economy. And this is precisely where the problem begins for technology companies: even if potentially strategic material lies in the ground, getting it into legal supply chains turns into a question of legal, reputational, and contractual risk.

Research published by Sara Mariella Lambertini in the Journal of Illicit Economies and Development (LSE) describes the mechanism even more starkly, outlining the consolidation of organised crime in the region and the way networks of control and violence “organise” illegal mining. A similar conclusion comes from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, which describes Orinoco as a multi-crime space, where mining is not a separate economic sector, but a node linking violence, corruption, smuggling, and financing.

Then there is something that, for an analyst, is always a red flag: the data problem. In The Orinoco Mining Arc: a historical perspective, Jose Rafael Lozada stresses that there is no stable, official statistical system that can answer even a basic question such as how many people work in mining. The author notes that more than 200,000 people depend on mining directly or indirectly — yet the structure of the argument itself reveals the core issue: we are dealing with estimates, not a transparent data system.

In practice, this means that “critical minerals” in Venezuela today are primarily a political and narrative topic—and only secondarily an industrial one. Let’s not pretend otherwise: for the electronics industry, that distinction is crucial. A resource without transparent provenance stops being strategic. It becomes a resource that simply cannot be defended in a supply-chain audit.

What does this mean for the industry, and why is the topic back now?

If the US genuinely attempts to open a new chapter in its relationship with Venezuela, markets will immediately return to the resource question. That’s only natural. But for the electronics industry, this renewed attention does not automatically mean “new supply.” It means a new risk variable.

First, Venezuela will not become a stable source of materials overnight, even if investment signals start to appear. Even the most optimistic scenario is a rebuilding project: infrastructure, logistics, expertise, institutions. This is a timeline measured in years, not quarters.

Second, in modern supply chains, legality and credible provenance matter more than price. In the case of Orinoco, the problem is not only what lies in the ground. The problem is who controls the ground and with it the flow of material, people, and money.

Third, there is a type of risk that has become uniquely expensive: the label. In technology and electronics, reputation acts as a multiplier. A resource carrying the shadow of violence, illegal extraction, or human rights abuses is not merely a “sensitive issue.” It is a threat—to the brand, to B2B relationships, and to the entire ESG narrative. And Venezuela — precisely because of how the Orinoco Mining Arc is described — has become a textbook example of a country where a resource is not only a metal, but a story no one wants attached to their logo.

The point is not how many resources Venezuela has. The point is what it lacks.

Venezuela holds bauxite, iron ore, and gold on a scale that, in theory, could attract capital and become a real industrial lever. It also has potential in critical minerals that read like a shopping list for the electronics world. But markets don’t invest in deposits. Markets invest in conditions.

Venezuela’s biggest deficit is not a lack of resources. It is a lack of predictability, the quiet foundation without which no country can be integrated into a global supply chain, no matter how promising its geology looks on paper. So if US moves are meant to trigger a “new Venezuela,” for the electronics industry this will above all be a test: can resources be turned into supply, and can potential be turned into something that survives a supply-chain audit?