What arbitration awards have U.S. companies won against Venezuela for nationalized oil assets and have those awards been enforced?

1. ConocoPhillips: landmark awards and a hard fight to convert paper into cash

ConocoPhillips secured an ICSID ruling finding Venezuela’s 2007 expropriations unlawful and awarding roughly $8.5–$8.7 billion plus interest, and separately obtained an ICC award of about $2 billion against PDVSA related to other projects, creating combined liabilities reported at over $10 billion ^{[1] [2] [3]}. Venezuela sought annulment and enforcement stays after the March 2019 ICSID award, and the secretary‑general provisionally stayed enforcement while those proceedings ran; tribunals and annulment committees ultimately rejected Venezuela’s attempts to void the ICSID award in late 2024–January 2025, removing that legal obstacle to enforcement ^{[2] [3]}.

2. Enforcement moves: seizures, “alter‑ego” claims and U.S. court wins — but no clean collection

ConocoPhillips and its counsel have moved aggressively to enforce awards by seeking to attach assets worldwide and by persuading U.S. courts to let them reach PDVSA‑linked corporate shares, including a U.S. Third Circuit decision that cleared a path to enforce a roughly $10.8 billion ICSID recognition judgment against PDV Holding shares tied to CITGO, using alter‑ego theories to pierce corporate separateness ^[6]. The U.S. Treasury has also authorized enforcement actions in some contexts, and Conoco has targeted Venezuelan assets abroad, but full recovery remains elusive because Venezuela refuses to pay, many assets are protected or outside reach, and legal fights over jurisdiction and sovereign immunity continue ^{[7] [6] [1]}.

3. ExxonMobil and other U.S. claimants: mixed awards, partial recoveries

ExxonMobil’s disputes produced multiple awards of differing sizes and character: tribunals awarded amounts ranging from roughly $179 million and $908 million in earlier cases to an ICSID award of about $1.6 billion in 2014 that was itself subject to offsets and procedural complexity; some elements were annulled or reduced, and Exxon has pursued enforcement in parallel proceedings ^{[5] [8] [9] [10]}. In short, Exxon’s results demonstrate arbitration unpredictability: some tribunals treated expropriation as lawful and limited compensation, others awarded more, and attempts to convert awards into cash have required separate enforcement litigation ^{[5] [9]}.

4. Smaller claimants and precedent: courts will sometimes enforce awards against Venezuela

U.S. and foreign courts have on occasion enforced awards against Venezuela or Venezuela‑related entities, including a U.S. court enforcing a US$108 million award to a Barbadian oil company and other judgments recognizing ICSID awards, which together create legal precedents claimants can use to chase attachable assets abroad ^{[11] [6]}. Yet enforcement outcomes vary by forum, the nature of the targeted assets, and competing political considerations — for example, assertions that seizures might conflict with U.S. recognition policies or sovereign immunity defenses have been litigated and sometimes rejected ^{[11] [6]}.

5. Current reality and limits of collection: paper victories, partial enforcement, political constraints

Despite multibillion‑dollar awards, Venezuela has largely refused to pay voluntarily; some limited recoveries have occurred (for example, PDVSA once delivered $400 million after enforcement pressure in an earlier episode), but the bulk of big awards remain subject to collection campaigns that are slow, costly, legally fraught and tied to geopolitics, sanctions and Venezuela’s dwindling pool of movable foreign assets — factors that blunt the practical impact of arbitration victories ^{[1] [4] [2]}. Reporting reviewed does not provide a comprehensive ledger of every enforcement dollar collected, so this account focuses on major awards and the observable state of enforcement litigation as reported ^{[7] [6] [3]}.