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By Jamie Prentis.
Tunis 5 May 2017:
The head of the National Oil Corporation (NOC), Mustafa Sanalla, has again had talks with the chairman of the Polish Oil and Gas Company (POGC), Filip Moczydlowski, and its general manager Szymon Drzewakowski, with a view to the it resuming operations in the country. They took place at the end of last month but have only been announced today.
One of Poland’s largest companies, the state-controlled POGC, has invested over $136 million in its two concessions in the Murzuk Basin. They were awarded in 2008.
Having started exploration drilling in March 2013, it discovered gas in February 2014 in contract area 113/1, 200 kilometres north west of Obari. The well was estimated at the time to have a daily production capacity of four million cubic feet of gas. However, because of security uncertainties POGC had already decided to its staff pull out of the area.
Moczydlowski and Drzewakowski met Sanalla in Tripoli last October, again to discuss resuming exploration and production, but they made it clear at the time that POGC would return only when security was improved. He again met them in January (along with several other oil companies) while attending an oil conference in London.
The meetings are part of Sanalla’s ongoing campaign to bring foreign companies back to Libya so as to increase investment in exploration and increase production.
As part of that campaign, Sanalla was in Houston, Texas, the capital of the US oil industry, on Tuesday to deliver the keynote speech at this years’s Offshore Technology Conference. On the sidelines, he met with the top officials from the US partners in Waha Oil – Marathon and Hess Corporation – also to discuss investment potential in Libya.
