CABIMAS, Venezuela -- An oil gusher discovered more than 100 years ago gave birth to Venezuela's energy industry near this once-booming city on the shores of Lake Maracaibo. Today, Cabimas is ground zero for the U.S. effort to resurrect the sector.

This city of 350,000 resembles an oil-industry graveyard. Mangled drill towers and collapsing offshore platforms are visible as far as the eye can see. Hardened globs of crude cling to fishing nets pulled from the lake, and natural gas gurgles up from busted underwater pipelines. The lake's shores are black with petroleum.

Nearby, children play baseball between leaky pump jacks that often stop working because of power outages that last up to 12 hours a day.

Many residents here say they can't wait for American investors to arrive and start plowing money into rebuilding the country's dilapidated oil infrastructure. Many remember the boom years of old when oil workers enjoyed housing provided by international oil companies, along with neighborhoods with swimming pools, sports clubs and golf courses, and a lake with clean water and healthy marine life.

The question they are asking is: Can the U.S. bring the good times back?

"God willing, the foreigners will come back soon and we'll have a better quality of life," said José Medina, a fisherman with five children. But he is worried it will take a long time. "It feels like we're neither moving forward nor backward."

The decaying industry here reflects two decades of mismanagement under late President Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro, whom the U.S. captured in a raid in January and is prosecuting in New York on drug-trafficking charges, which Maduro denies. Industry executives and experts say residents' fears are well-founded: Reviving Venezuela's oil sector will be a lengthy undertaking costing hundreds of billions of dollars.

Ten months after Maduro's ouster, little of the investment has flowed in. National oil production has hovered just above a million barrels a day since January, up from 500,000 a day in 2020 after U.S. sanctions began to bite but far below the more than 3.2 million barrels a day produced in the late 1990s.

U.S. officials say change is on the horizon. At a packed conference of foreign investors in Venezuela's capital, Caracas, last week, Michael Garcia, deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy, pointed to recent deals involving Chevron and power-equipment firm GE Vernova as evidence that an alliance with Maduro's former deputy, acting President Delcy Rodríguez, was reviving the oil sector and shoring up a notoriously shaky national electrical grid.

"Real work remains," Garcia said. "But the direction is unmistakable. Where there was stagnation, there is now investment."

The conference, another in a string of events marking Venezuela's reopening after years of economic isolation and American sanctions, brought more than 650 executives from international energy companies together at the JW Marriott -- a hotel favored by U.S. diplomats.

There was little disagreement over the tremendous business potential in a country sitting on some of the world's largest oil and gas reserves.

"Venezuela has more crown jewels than the Tower of London," said Hunter Hunt, chief executive of Texas wildcatter Hunt Energy.

Panelists at the three-day conference were asked to keep discussions technical and apolitical, leaving Venezuela's political future unaddressed. Polls show growing discontent with Rodríguez's unelected interim administration, a potential obstacle to long-term investment. Small protests have broken out nationwide in recent weeks, with demonstrators blocking roads to demand elections and expressing frustration with their quality of life.

Executives at the conference listed the challenges to ramping up output: power cuts, a small pool of experienced contractors, and the difficulty of securing project financing while navigating a web of U.S. sanctions. Only a third of the 30,000 wells in the country is active after almost eight years of international blacklisting that kept new technologies from entering, said William Antonio, managing director for Mexico, Central America and Venezuela at SLB, a global energy-services firm formerly known as Schlumberger.

"The learning curve has been difficult," said César Álvarez, deputy regional director for French firm Maurel & Prom, which aims to double its output this year to 22,000 barrels a day. "We drew up an action plan, but we ran up against reality and had to delay some activities."

The return of U.S. investors to Venezuela has also revived old political grievances. Jorge Giordani, a Marxist and former chief economic planner in Venezuela's government, told a gathering of leftist activists in Caracas that capitalists are trying to steal "the devil's excrement," the enormous oil wealth long seen as a blessing and curse in the country.

"They're back," the 86-year-old said. "And they're only interested in one thing: our hydrocarbons."

Lucila Nava, a retired secretary whose father had worked for 40 years at Shell and who lives near Lake Maracaibo, said she was frustrated that the U.S. supported Rodríguez and kept Maduro's authoritarian government intact as foreign companies secured lucrative contracts.

"We liked [President] Trump when he took out Maduro," Nava said. "But you can't just take away oil like this. We get it, the U.S. is the biggest power in the world. But that doesn't give you the right to do something like this."

U.S. and Venezuelan officials are pressing foreign companies to further develop offshore gas deposits and the fields in eastern Venezuela, which contain heavy, tar-like oil. But the areas offering the fastest recovery are here in the west around Lake Maracaibo, a Connecticut-sized patch of territory where some of the country's oldest installations are located.

Executives hope old brownfields -- as mature fields are called -- can be quickly rejuvenated. Several of the 17 oil blocs recently acquired by private Venezuelan firm North American Blue Energy Partners in a joint venture with the Pentagon are also located here. California-based Pacific Coast Energy Co., among newcomers to Venezuela's energy patch, said this week that it has started a program to reactivate 900 wells in Cabimas.

Around the lake, the remnants of Venezuela's oil boom are woven into everyday life, with homes surrounded by rusting pump jacks and pipelines.

Housing developments were built around crude-processing facilities in an architectural style reminiscent of 1960s American suburbs -- a throwback to the era when U.S. energy companies were instrumental in building the oil economy. In the El Milagro neighborhood of the town of Lagunillas, elderly residents who had grown up during the country's economic heyday now struggle with daily power outages and a scant water supply.

"We have no services and no one complains or does anything about it, because everyone just got used to this crap," said Aracelis Urdaneta, who grew up here during the oil boom.

People try to be resourceful with what is left of the oil industry. In Cabimas, a group of neighbors tap a pump jack for natural gas and pipe it into their kitchens. At times, oil seeps through the rudimentary pipework, sending the black goo into the kitchen.

Security guard Elmo Quintero said he had hoped that after Maduro's overthrow, his three children in Colombia could return home and the decrepit health system would improve. A diabetic, the 65-year-old said he couldn't afford insulin and the local clinic rarely has syringes. He self-medicates with a concoction of herbal tea.

Quintero helps maintain a rusted pump jack for the state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, on a patio adjacent to his brick shack. His chickens feed between pipelines. Water service is available for a couple of days every three months. As he spoke, the pump jack ground to a halt behind him -- another power failure.

He was doubtful he would see an improvement in his lifetime. "I'm thinking more about my grandchildren," Quintero said.