The January 3 2026 capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and subsequent US claims of control over Caracas's oil sector positions certain Indian companies from both the public and private sector in the limelight.

Most affected are likely to be Reliance Industries (NSE:RELIANCE), a private company which owns India’s biggest and most diversified refining facility and state-owned ONGC Videsh (NSE:ONGC), that leads much of India’s participation in foreign oil and gas projects.

While Reliance shares were already on an upward trajectory even before the US special operation in Venezuela, the event nonetheless triggered them to touch a 52-week high and revealed just how much of an impact the US’s unrelated actions can have on India's refining economics.

For Reliance, whose Jamnagar complex in India represents the world's most sophisticated crude-processing facility, access to Venezuelan heavy crude at a $5–$8 discount to Brent pricing constitutes a major refining margin enhancement opportunity with potential earnings upside that capital markets are now calibrating into equity valuations.

According to a report by The Economic Times, India once imported 400,000 barrels per day from Caracas, establishing a natural commercial partnership predicated on processing economics, not geopolitical or ideological alignment. US sanctions imposed on Venezuela in 2019 eliminated this supply stream overnight. By 2025, Venezuelan crude represented only 28,000 barrels of imports per day, according to a report by Moneycontrol.

The collapse reflects both sanctions enforcement and the logistical impracticality of processing extremely heavy crude without access to critical diluent chemicals the US embargo restricted. Reliance Industries bore the operational penalty of this sanctions regime more severely than any of its domestic competitors in the Indian market.

The company's Jamnagar refining complex is a 1.4mn barrel per day facility incorporating proprietary cracking and coking capacity, and was architecturally engineered for Venezuelan heavy-sour crude processing, exploiting crude-grade arbitrage that commodity market economics rendered uniquely profitable for complex refiners.

When Venezuelan supplies evaporated, Reliance shifted procurement toward lighter crude grades, sacrificing the margin differential that comes from converting low priced heavy barrels into high value diesel and other petroleum products. The financial implications cut directly through to quarterly earnings. Gross refining margins (GRM), the spread between refined product output value and crude input cost contracted sharply during the 2019-2025 sanctions period as Reliance operated Jamnagar at suboptimal crude chemistry.

Heavy crude discount structures typically confer 2–3% points of GRM advantage versus light crude operations. For a refinery processing 1.4mn barrels daily at a $2–3 per barrel margin differential, this represents $28–42mn in quarterly earnings opportunity cost, or approximately $112–168mn annually. Over six years, the cumulative earnings impact of Venezuelan crude unavailability approaches $700mn in foregone margin generation.

The US takeover scenario inverts this arithmetic. Should sanctions relief materialise and Venezuelan production recover to commercial viability - Venezuelan output is currently 930,000 barrels per day down from nearly 2.5mn barrels per day in 2012 - Reliance regains access to the margin-accretive crude that Jamnagar was designed to process, says a report in the Financial Review.

Indian state owned ONGC Videsh’s prospective dividend recovery adds a distinct financial leverage that will have the Indian government just as interested as the private sector. ONGC Videsh holds 40% participating interest in Venezuela’s San Cristobal oilfield and 11% participation in the Carabobo-1 project. Yet the earnings upside window narrows against production recovery headwinds.

Venezuela's infrastructure has also likely deteriorated during six years of US sanctions, combined with the capital intensive requirement to rebuild extraction, processing, and export infrastructure. This may suggest that crude exports may not reach commercially significant volumes before 2027–2028.

Even then, production will likely plateau at 500,000–800,000 barrels per day which is substantially below the pre sanctions production, creating competitive bidding among Indian refiners such as Reliance, partly Russian owned Nayara Energy, and Indian state owned Indian Oil (NSE:IOC), among others for limited heavy crude volumes.​