By J. Brent Crosson, Associate Professor, UT Austin
“Dragon Gas”—that was the phrase on the lips of Trinidadian commentators following the 2024 US presidential elections. As Trinidad and Tobago1 prepared for its own national elections in April 2025, politicians, economists, and analysts eyed the fate of a dragon that slept just off the shore of Trinidad, in Venezuelan waters. In 2023 under the conditions of Biden-era sanctions waivers, Venezuela’s national oil company (PDVSA) granted Trinidad’s National Gas Company a 30-year lease (operated by the Shell corporation) to develop a cross-border natural gas development, colloquially dubbed “Dragon Gas” in Trinidad. Trinidad’s central government had made Dragon Gas the center of promises to revitalize the country’s declining oil and gas industry, delivering prosperity that would allegedly end the nation’s current economic malaise. However, as newly reelected US President Trump and his appointed US Secretary of State Marco Rubio vowed in late February 2025 to cancel all Biden-era sanctions-waivers for oil and gas development with Venezuela, the dragon dance of future prosperity seemed like an increasingly dubious prospect.
The much-anticipated “Dragon Gas” derives its name from a submarine natural gas field off the coast of Venezuela’s Paria Peninsula: The Dragon Field, known as El Campo Dragón in Venezuela. Since only a few miles of ocean separate the tip of the Paria Peninsula from the shores of Trinidad, the Dragon Field buts up against Trinidad’s maritime borders, and only a relatively short pipeline would be necessary to pump Dragon Gas into Trinidad’s robust natural gas-processing infrastructure. If it ever happens, the Dragon project would represent the first time that Venezuela would be able to export its natural gas (because gas, unlike oil, has to be processed to become a monetized commodity). Though Trinidad and Venezuela are separated by only a few miles of sea, Venezuela exports no natural gas or derivatives, while Trinidad is the world’s largest exporter of the natural gas-derivative ammonia and one of the largest exporters of liquified natural gas (LNG). However, over the past decade, Trinidad’s natural gas processing plants have been operating below capacity, with their share of global LNG exports steadily shrinking (and the United States’ share of LNG exports skyrocketing thanks to “fracking”). Dragon Gas would radically change these situations, making Venezuela into an exporter of natural gas and restoring growth in Trinidad’s largely natural gas-based economy. But this “dragon dance” needs a party permit to happen, specifically a permit from the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)—the international punitive wing of the US Treasury.
When thinking about postcolonial futures from the perspective of Trinidad, it is hard not to pay attention to submarine dragons with transnational tails. These tails point not toward a future of renewable energy, but toward a somewhat desperate bid by one of the world’s oldest petro-states to regain prominence in an oil and gas market heavily dominated by the US. Since United States’ widespread implementation of fracking, a particularly resource-intensive method of mining fossil fuels, the US has become the world’s largest producer of oil and gas by large margins since 2014 (while maintaining its long-standing position as the largest consumer of these hydrocarbons). Though experiencing declining production during this same period, Trinidad is arguably the world’s oldest petro-economy, with a commercial well drilled there in 1857, two years before the Drake Well in Pennsylvania that is usually taken as the starting point for the modern oil industry (see, for example, Wilson et al. 2017: 5). By World War I, the British colony of Trinidad was the primary supplier of oil to the world’s largest consumer of petroleum—the British Empire, which was the first global power to convert its navy from coal to oil. Oil extraction in Trinidad began under colonial conditions in which the people of Trinidad did not control the resources beneath their feet. While Trinidad gained independence in 1962 and the oil industry became partially nationalized during the Oil Boom of the 1970s, in practice Trinidad does not control the exploitation of its subsoil resources or its access to supplies of natural gas today. Amidst his unilateral threats directed at the Caribbean region2, Trump promised spectacular domestic prosperity by urging the US to “drill, baby, drill” in his 2025 inauguration speech, appointing a fracking-magnate as Secretary of Energy. The repercussion of Trump’s early 2025 policies in the Caribbean showed that the Trinidadian government’s own promises of future prosperity remained bound to the vagaries of the world’s largest producer and consumer of oil and gas. The 2024 US elections, therefore, left Trinidadians wondering whether the touted Dragon would be able to dance.
The “dragon dance” between the petro-states of Trinidad, Venezuela, and the US demonstrates several dynamics: first, the powerful regional effects that US sanctions can exert on unsanctioned countries; second, the limits of Latin American and Caribbean states’ ownership of subsoil resources; and third, the transformation of power that is taking place in what I, following Anna Palmer, term “late petro-states.” I take the term “dragon dance” from the most iconic post-Black Power novel in Trinidad—The Dragon Can’t Dance (1979) by Earl Lovelace. The novel revolves around the carnival dragon masquerade of its central character Aldrick, who painstakingly hand-sews his dragon costume each year in preparation for the island’s famed carnival. While Aldrick makes the costume with his own hands and becomes a fearsome dragon by donning the suit, he realizes that he does not own the dragon costume (since the figure of the dragon is the collective, rather than individual, property of Trinidad’s mass celebration of Carnival). Ultimately, Aldrick hangs up his dragon suit as carnival becomes increasingly commodified and controlled by corporate sponsorship. Rather than letting corporations appropriate a dragon he does not own, he refuses to let the dragon circulate. Instead of dancing the dragon, he participates in an armed rebellion that is ultimately suppressed by the Trinidadian state.
In a resonant (yet different) way, Trinidad has had to realize that it did not really own the Dragon Gas that promised to clothe the country in renewed petro-prosperity. Rather than refusing to let this dragon circulate in a market it could not control, however, the outgoing government attempted to woo Marco Rubio in a bid to make an ailing dragon dance. As the opposition party (UNC) has taken power, they have scuttled the Dragon Gas project in light of US sanctions, promising to obtain natural gas from Guyana (or, possibly, Suriname). Yet, as Guyanese officials made clear to Trinidad in meetings with the new government, they also do not effectively control the fate of the natural gas beneath that country. Vice President of Guyana, Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo, stated that the decision regarding Guyana’s gas ultimately lay with the US corporation Exxon-Mobil, which was in charge of monetizing the resource. Given that a pipeline from Guyana to Trinidad would be much longer and would still have to pass through Venezuelan waters (a country currently in a long-standing border dispute with Guyana), it seemed dubious as to whether Exxon-Mobil would see such a project as a better investment than simply investing in natural gas processing in Guyana (a country where Exxon-Mobil enjoys incredibly generous concessions). In late April 2025, the Energy Chamber of Trinidad and Tobago themselves admitted that: “In the past Exxon’s Country Manager [in Guyana], Alistair Routledge, said the distance between Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago, as well as the route it must take through Venezuela’s territorial waters, are two major obstacles hindering the construction of a natural gas pipeline to export gas from Guyana to T&T.”
Aldrick’s response to owning, but ultimately not owning, a prized dragon was to hang up the costume. The Trinidadian government’s response to not owning a dragon has been to continue what Ryan Jobson (2024) calls “the petro-state masquerade” of immanent, limitless wealth. Even as the opposition government rejected the outgoing administration’s flagship Dragon Gas project, they simply proceeded as if they could control the gas that flows into Trinidad by finding another partner who was not sanctioned by the US. Sanctions, however, are not simply targeted punitive measures (although the US government tends to portray them as such). Certainly, as critics of sanctions on Venezuela have noted, US sanctions enact collective punishment on the most vulnerable populations of the target country, while the ostensible object of sanctions (government elites) are able to maintain their economic and political power. More than this, Dragon Gas shows that sanctions exert regional consequences that overflow the boundaries of the targeted nation, affecting unsanctioned US allies. Even without sanctions, the final decision on resource extraction often lies not with the governments of Caribbean countries that ostensibly “own” these resources, but with the private corporations that fund and execute their extraction.
For Aldrick in The Dragon Can’t Dance (Lovelace 1979), the dragon’s inability to dance was a choice, a concerted refusal to let the dragon circulate in a market he could not control. For the government of Trinidad (as well as Venezuela or Guyana), however, there is no refusal. They might love to realize Trump’s dictate of “drill, baby, drill,” but they are largely dependent on foreign (primarily US, European, and Australian) capital or US-dominated geopolitics to realize this “petro-state masquerade.”
Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando Coronil, in his foundational 1997 work, asserted that the petro-state performs the “magic” of turning hydrocarbons into money. Ultimately, however, this is not exactly the case. Over a hundred years ago, private capital structured the oil industries in Trinidad and Venezuela to reproduce dependency on export of a raw material. This was particularly intensive in early twentieth-century Venezuela, where Dutch and US companies intentionally offshored refining capacity to Curaçao and Aruba to ensure a separation between the concentrated labor of refinement and sites of extraction. Like Trinidad, Venezuela formed a national oil company during the oil boom of the 1970’s but continued to be dependent on crude export and foreign capital. The anti-Chávez 2002-2003 Oil Strike (paro petrolero) of the early Chávez years further exacerbated Venezuela’s reliance on a very crude (pun intended) form of extractivism, also contributing to the subsequent flight of the upper-middle-class Venezuelan professionals who had provided the technical expertise within the country’s oil industry. The fact that Venezuela, while possessing the world’s largest reserves of oil, now experiences gasoline shortages and has to import refined oil has many causes, including current government mismanagement and US sanctions (which make it difficult to import the inputs necessary for refining Venezuela’s heavy crude). Yet, some of the causes of the current crisis predate the Bolivarian revolution by decades.
Trinidad does not face an economic crisis of Venezuela’s magnitude and is not as dependent on crude oil export because the country used some of the windfall profits of the Oil Boom to construct value-added processing infrastructure for natural gas. Yet, they also face declining production and an economic downturn conditioned by geopolitical contexts. Trinidad sits next to both a heavily sanctioned petro-state (Venezuela) and a new petro-state that charges extremely low royalties on foreign companies (Guyana). One of its neighbors to the north (the US) has become the world’s largest producer of oil and gas by large margins since 2014, weakening the bargaining power of established global south petro-states and diminishing the United States’ reliance on imported oil and gas. Foreign capital would surely prefer the new offshore frontiers of Guyana, a pliable government that only charges 2 percent royalties on Exxon-Mobil (royalties in Trinidad are typically in the 10-12.5 percent range).
In this context, old petro-states in the region are experiencing what I, repurposing Anna Palmer’s turn-of-phrase, call “late petro-state” politics. As the ability of the government to enact the redistributive “magic” of turning fossil fuels into money falters, politics themselves become fossilized. An increasingly conservative or authoritarian populism, which emphasizes strict loyalty to a party or leader, replaces redistributive petro-populism as the basis of the social contract. This is particularly the case in Venezuela today, where the vast social welfare infrastructure of the Chávez years has rapidly collapsed since 2014, with authoritarian politics and transactional loyalties holding an eviscerated social contract tenuously in place. The rise of authoritarian populism is also quite marked in another old petro-state, albeit one that, by virtue of its “first-world status” is hardly ever labelled as such: the United States. One of the many differences between these countries, of course, is that Venezuela has faced a very real economic crisis, while the US, located at the center of imperial power, petro-capital, and refining capacities, has faced no comparable crisis. However, the early months of the Trump administration have shown how the rise of a kleptocratic authoritarian populism can itself induce economic uncertainty. There are further qualifications and distinctions necessary in making this comparison3, but the point remains that authoritarianism and transactional loyalties mark late petro-politics in states that remain heavily dependent on fossil fuels amidst a rapidly accelerating climate crisis and the push for alternative energy sources. As climate crisis demands a reconsideration of these countries’ economic bases, but no viable alternatives to the petro-economy are seriously pursued, politics themselves in late petro-states fossilize. Sandy Smith-Noninni has thus incisively noted in this special series that continued prioritization of fossil fuel-based systems in the US has created a rigid climate of “fossilized politics.”
Trinidad has not experienced this magnitude of an authoritarian turn. It is an intensely democratic and plural country with no ethnic, racial, or religious majority. Unlike in Venezuela or the US, Trinidad has had non-white political leadership since independence (even as a very small minority of local whites and near-white “Syrians” exert disproportionate economic power). Unlike in Venezuela or the US, the overwhelming majority of the population in Trinidad are descendants of plantation labor. Still, like Venezuela and the US, the government of Trinidad continues to wager its future on fossil fuel extraction, denying a reality in which the world must drastically decrease fossil fuel extraction to survive. Politics increasingly depend on promises of spectacular wealth to sugar-coat the reality of a declining petro-economy. While Trinidad has not experienced an equivalent surge of authoritarian populism as compared with the petro-states of Venezuela or the United States, the prime minister elected in the 2025 elections has openly expressed admiration for Trump’s “anti-woke” agenda, reproducing some key Republican agenda items in its platform, including anti-immigrant policing (which in Trinidad largely targets recent Venezuelan migrants), gun rights, stand your ground laws, and spectacular promises of an immanent (yet dubious) return of working class prosperity.
Unfortunately, there is more than enough fossil fuel below the earth to continue the current system for years to come. However, in Trinidad, the ability to extract or explore for these fossil fuels is severely limited by the rise of neighboring competition (the US or Guyana), its vulnerability to the vagaries of US geopolitics, and its long-standing relation of dependence on foreign petro-capital. Dragon Gas made these limitations of the “petro-state masquerade” of unending prosperity abundantly clear. Rather than simply betting the country’s future on a rather dubious prospect of a gas pipeline from Guyana, future governments will have to find a new basis for the legitimation of political power besides the “magic” of the petro-state. And like Aldrick, they will eventually have to hang up the dragon costume and attempt to enact alternatives to “the petro-state masquerade.”
Footnotes
References
Coronil, Fernando. 1997. The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Jobson, Ryan C. 2024. The Petro-State Masquerade: Oil, Sovereignty, and Power in Trinidad and Tobago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lovelace, Earl. 1979. The Dragon Can’t Dance. London: André Deutsch.
Wilson, Sheena, Imre Szeman, and Adam Carlson. 2017. “On Petrocultures: Or, Why We Need to Understand Oil to Understand Everything Else.” In Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture, edited by S. Wilson, I. Szeman, and A. Carlson, pp. 3–20. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
