U.S. oil and gas company ConocoPhillips, which left Venezuela after nationalizing its assets in 2007, is negotiating Venezuela oil imports to the US to recover nearly the $10 billion it owes Caracas, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing informed sources.

In preliminary talks, ConocoPhillips is proposing an option that would allow it to load, transport and sell Venezuelan oil to the U.S. on behalf of PDVSA, Venezuela’s oil state company. That would give ConocoPhillips a chance to get its money back and help the U.S. meet its energy needs, sources said.

If an agreement is reached, Venezuela could break out of the trade blockade caused by U.S. sanctions imposed on its crude oil industry in 2019, the publication noted. Before the sanctions, the U.S. was historically Venezuela’s largest oil trade market, and several large refineries on the Gulf Coast were designed to process its heavy oil.

As a result of U.S. sanctions, Venezuela lost 98.6 percent of all foreign exchange earnings from 2014 to 2020, with contributions from state oil and gas company PDVSA to the country’s central bank dropping from $56,609 billion to $73.4 million a year from 2014 to 2020, or more than 99 percent.

Earlier, we reported on Brent oil price forecast for 2023 from Goldman Sachs: experts forecast $110.