Trump says US has received 80m barrels of Venezuelan oil; 3rd tanker seized 

President Donald Trump has said the United States has received “more than 80 million barrels of oil” from Venezuela, hours after the Pentagon said US forces had “captured” a third “sanctioned” oil tanker in the Indian Ocean.

“We just received from our new friend and partner, Venezuela, more than 80 million barrels of oil,” Trump announced during his State of the Union address in Washington, DC, on Tuesday night.

“American oil production is up by more than 600,000 barrels a day,” said Trump, who reiterated his promise to “drill, baby, drill” for oil as president.

Trump’s lauding of growth in the US oil sector comes after he sent special forces to conduct a bloody raid on Caracas in January and abduct Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro, who had warned that Washington’s animosity towards his government was a pretext for the US to seize Venezuelan oil reserves.

The Trump administration has since promised to open up Venezuela’s oil industry to US oil companies, including Chevron, Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips, which were among several oil companies Trump hosted at the White House for a meeting about the South American country’s oil on January 9, just days after Maduro was abducted to the US.

Trump’s comments followed after the Pentagon said earlier on Tuesday that US forces had boarded another oil tanker in the Indian Ocean linked to Venezuela.

“Three boats ran and now all three have been captured,” the US Department of Defense wrote in a post on social media, which also included a video showing weapons directed towards a ship as it was boarded by troops descending from two helicopters.

The post did not specify which country the vessel, known as Bertha, had come from, but said US forces had tracked the tanker “from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean”.

Samir Madani, a cofounder of oil tanker monitoring site TankerTrackers.com, said Bertha was one of the 16 oil tankers to have fled the Venezuelan coast after US forces abducted Maduro on January 3, according to The Associated Press news agency.

Madani told AP on Tuesday that the Bertha was laden with 1.9 million barrels of Merey 16 crude, which is a grade of Venezuelan oil.

The Bertha was flagged to the Cook Islands when it was placed under US sanctions related to Iran, according to the website of the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.

However, the vessel was more recently listed under a false flag of the Caribbean island of Curacao and managed by a company in China, according to Equasis, a shipping information system.

The latest developments come as the Trump administration continues to expand oil extraction in the US and abroad, including in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Trump’s doubling down on fossil fuels comes as many island countries in the Caribbean region have been calling for a transition to renewable energy as they struggle to respond to increasingly severe tropical storms made worse by climate change.