By Libya Herald reporters.
Tunis, 31 October 2017:
If the National Oil Corporation (NOC) can bring 11 new offshore gas wells on stream as planned in the course of next year, it may find it has largely escaped the supply disruptions brought about by armed gangs sabotaging gas pipelines in one cause or another.
NOC said this week that it hoped that the first of the new gas wells being worked up in its Bahr Al-Salam field in the Gulf of Sirte would start producing by next May.
The gas and condensates, the discovery of which was announced in April, will be delivered to the Mellitah complex, a NOC joint venture with Italy’s Eni which takes much of the gas by sub-sea pipeline to Sicily. This, said a NOC spokesman will sustain the Mellitah facility “for the years to come”.
Indeed it is Libya’s offshore oil and gas fields that have produced the one constant in its export earnings. Oil from the Bouri field is pumped into a floating storage tanker safely away away the coast, from which it is loaded onto tankers.
The gas is more problematic since it has first to be landed and cleaned at Mellitah before the greater part of it is exported to Europe via the sub-Mediterranean Green Stream line.
