By Libya Herald reporters.
Tunis, 24 July 2017:
Libya is not to be asked to cap its oil production OPEC members meeting with other producers in Russia decided today.
National Oil Corporation’s (NOC) Mustafa Sanalla had led the Libyan delegation to the oil producing countries meeting in St Petersburg warning that fellow OPEC states should think of the economic and social consequences of pressing any ceiling on Libya’s output, currently hovering above a million barrels a day (bpd).
Nigeria, along with Libya was exempted from OPEC’s price support caps agreed at the end of last year in Algiers. However in St Petersburg today the mood toward the former appeared to have changed and the Nigerian government has given an assurance that it would join the cap when its output had stabilised at 1.8 million bpd.
However, Libya whose production was 1.6 million bps before the Revolution, appears to have escaped capping pressure. Kuwait was one OPEC member that went public with its belief that Libya should continue to be exempted.
So far the normally vocal Sanalla has made no comment on the outcome of the Russian talks. Though Moscow shares OPEC’s concern to restore some sort of price stability in the international markets, two of its leading oil companies, Rosneft and Tatneft are now involved in deals to help NOC restore Libya’s degraded oil production infrastructure and so increase its output. It was expected that during his Russian trip, Sanalla would be having further talks with both companies.
