LIVE: Energy Secretary Chris Wright Holds Press Gaggle in Caracas

How did this building come down? Is this building repairable? What to do here? But there's workers, a lot of workers from the United States and around the world, stepping up to help Venezuela. What a heartbreaking sight. Yeah, actually, we believe this is the cure for socialism. Socialism, communism arrived here over 25 years ago. It chilled outside investments, set the economy to free fall, and 8 million refugees fleeing. What we're trying to do is restore confidence as quickly as possible. We saw three large corporate deals signed today. That's fantastic. But the U.S. partnership with the largest local Venezuelan producer I think will supercharge confidence, and certainly I heard that from other private companies I spoke with today, to increase the pace of investment. The security and business dealings when you have the United States government as a partner on the ground, and we're a passive, we're not going to be operating a national oil company, but we have an economic interest here in Venezuela. It'll benefit American citizens, it'll benefit American taxpayers, but it also restores confidence in the investment climate in Venezuela. I think we see very rapid production growth in Venezuela. That's great for oil prices, that's great for energy prices in the United States. It's just tremendous in supercharging the Venezuelan economy. 25 years sliding into poverty, we want to see the country move. Well, Venezuelan oil is on the open market today. The U.S. is the largest buyer of that, but some of these cargos are going to Asia, some are going to Europe, cargos are going to India. What we're going to see is rapidly growing production out of Venezuela. We set aggressive goals at the start, but here we are eight months in, 50 percent increase in Venezuelan oil exports, 25 percent increase in total Venezuelan production already, and I think we're ahead of schedule, and we'll see faster growth in the years ahead. On that point, how can the administration say that it doesn't need oil? Well, I mean, as soon as the oil leaves here, it goes directly to a refinery. Refineries are the only customers for oil. So the production in Venezuela is growing every month, but to massively lower oil prices, that's a few-year prospect for sure, but I think it's putting downward pressure on oil prices today, American refineries were designed to refine Venezuelan crude because they were the largest oil exporter in the world when most American refineries were produced. On Monday, so just two days ago, we had over 17 million barrels of oil flowing on ships out of the Strait of Hormuz. That's the largest we've seen since the conflict began, and that's the critical effort. The United States Navy, in partnership with the countries in the Gulf, is to increase the oil and gas output so much that the world economy can't be held hostage by Iran. It takes the only card they have in their hands right now out of their hands. I think we should see gasoline prices start to moderate, start to move down as we go into the fall. You know, we've changed blending regulations for refineries to help American refiners get greater throughput. We're increasing oil output out of Venezuela. We're increasing oil output in Alaska, offshore in the Gulf of America, in the United States. So it's a supply and demand, but Iran having a nuclear weapon is simply an existential challenge, and President Trump is dead set on not kicking that can down to his successor president to have a nuclear arm in Iran. Yes, that's disruptive to go through that, but we cannot have a nuclear arm in Iran. Every day President Trump works to lower energy prices. We saw the benefit of that in the first 12 months in office, and then he had the courage to say, I'm going to fix a long-term problem, and at the same time, I'm going to invest in growing energy production and be in a better position after the conflict with Iran than we were before the conflict with Iran. Thank you.