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Libya’s state oil company has reopened another port, the third to resume operations in less than a week, as a political truce is established in the OPEC member’s devastating civil war.
The National Petroleum Corporation (NOC) is ending force majeure, a legal status that protects a party unable to perform a contract for reasons beyond its control, in Zueitina, eastern Libya, after a ” significant improvement “in security there, he said Tuesday. The NOC allowed exports to resume days earlier from the Hariga and Brega terminals. All three ports had been closed since January as part of a broader blockade.
The NOC said it is evaluating security at Libya’s other export terminals as the country with Africa’s largest crude reserves comes closer to reviving its battered oil industry. National production will more than double next week to 260,000 barrels a day, the company said Monday night.
The three eastern ports were closed eight months ago after Khalifa Haftar, a Russian-backed commander who controls eastern Libya, blocked power facilities in his fight to overthrow the United Nations-backed government in the western capital, Tripoli As a result, Libya’s daily crude production fell to less than 100,000 barrels from 1.2 million last year. The NOC said Wednesday it shipped $ 38.2 million worth of oil, natural gas and condensate in July, the lowest monthly figure this year.
Hariga, Brega and Zueitina are now classified as “safe ports,” the NOC said in a press release. “The remaining fields and ports are being evaluated in accordance with the security and protection standards in force in the national oil sector.”
Oil facilities have been the main prize in a civil war that is now almost a decade old, with different groups shutting them down or sabotaging them to press political and economic demands. The industry’s gradual reopening began after Haftar said on Sept. 18 that he would lift his lockdown. The NOC has cited the dangers of resuming oil production where the military is close.
Es Sider and Ras Lanuf, the country’s third largest oil ports, remain closed, as does the Zawiya terminal, which normally exports crude from the country’s largest field, Sharara.
The amount of additional oil Libya can export will also depend on how quickly it can repair wells, pipelines and storage tanks that have been neglected or damaged during the conflict. Production will increase as workers return to the fields that feed Brega and Hariga, and tankers will begin arriving at both ports to load crude, the NOC said.
The Suezmax Delta Hellas tanker will arrive in Hariga on Wednesday to load 1 million barrels of crude from storage, allowing production at the Sarir and Messla oil fields to resume immediately, said Arabian Gulf Oil Co., which operates both. deposits, on their Facebook page. .
Crude storage tanks at Libyan export terminals hold about 24 million barrels, OilX analysts, including Juan Carlos Rodríguez and Florian Thaler, wrote in a report Wednesday. Only Hariga and Zueitina are well over 50 percent full and can “sustain an immediate increase in exports” before production in the oil fields resumes, they said.
Although previous deals to reopen Libya’s oil industry have failed, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. estimates that exports could reach 550,000 barrels a day by the end of the year. Bloomberg Intelligence believes that a figure close to 1 million is possible.
