I anticipate the same "plan" here; not exploiting Venezuelan reserves to increase production, but to disrupt production to tighten supply and raise oil company profits.

Thing is- Venezuelan production is currently less than 1 million bbl/day. Not sure how restricting that production will affect global crude output, especially given the elastic nature of OPEC quotas- leaky as they are.

Agreed. Of all of the mechanisms by which this operation could help oil companies, this seems the weakest. Global oil production is more than 105 mbpd, and Venezuela's output is well less than a percent of that. And it's fairly unlikely that the U.S. would want to zero out that production altogether, given the catastrophe that would inflict on the country (which depends on oil export revenue for something like 5% of GDP and about 60% of government revenue.

The far more likely benefits to oil companies (if such occur) would be that a different Venezuelan leader would either give them valuable access to Venezuela's oil reserves or provide some additional compensation for past nationalization and seizure of their assets. Or that they get some valuable subsidized opportunities to invest in Venezuela's oil infrastructure - even if they don't necessarily end up running the extraction, it can be good business to get paid to install a lot of equipment with a payment guarantee from the U.S. government rather than PdVSA. All of which are really speculative, and it's possible that none materialize. But cutting such a small amount from global oil production in the short term, with expectations of near doubling oil production in the longer term, is unlikely to materially increase oil prices - and indeed hasn't.