By Jamie Prentis.
Tunis, 10 July 2017:
With OPEC seemingly likely to ask Libya to cap its oil production, National Oil Corporation chief Mustafa Sanalla has warned that the country’s array of problems need to be weighed carefully before such a request is made.
Libya and Nigeria are exempt from OPEC’s price-stabilising caps agreed last year in Algiers, because of both their poor security and variable oil output.
“Libya’s political, humanitarian and economic situation needs to be taken into account if we are going to talk about production caps,” Sanalla told Reuters.
Traders insist Libya recently reached one million barrels per day bpd and is planning to hit 1.2 million bpd soon. NOC has not yet confirmed the magic million figure.
Sanalla has just visited El Fil oil field, currently producing around 90,000 bpd ,to assess efforts to boost output. In a speech to oil workers he complained of a scarcity of resources, which he has repeatedly said is the key reason Libya has not returned to pre-2011 production levels.
With oil Libya’s key economic asset, output had to continue to rise in order to support the state Sanalla added.
El-Fil has experienced a series of closures and re-openings since April, having only restarted last December after two years being shut in.
Sanalla recently visited Sharara oil field, also in the Murzuq basin, which before the Revolution used to yield between 340,000 and 400,000 bpd of light, sweet crude. He was also assessing efforts to boost production there.
