ROME – It is not the first time that oil exports from Libya have been paralyzed, sending supplies for Europe into a tailspin and causing the price of a barrel to skyrocket on the financial markets. The last time was last April, when the wells of the deposit were closed Shararain the desert south of Tripoliin that vast area that is defined “Crescent oil”And that the Italians – during the Fascist occupation – thought it was just a box of sand, a refuge for the rebels. The Noc company (an acronym that identifies the “old” state company National Oil Corporation) was forced to stop because armed groups had threatened the plant’s employees.
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A recurring crisis
But this, after the fall of the colonel Gaddafi, is the rule. Hydrocarbons are the country’s only wealth (48 billion barrels of proven reserves, among the largest in Africa) and oil fields become the object of pressure in the civil war between the two factions. Continued attacks force foreign companies operating in Libya (including Eni which has been present in the country since the 1960s) to provide for the safety of plants and personnel. And they prevent the fields from producing at their maximum potential, because the efficiency and revitalization works are proceeding slowly with great difficulty. Especially since the plants of local companies, starting with the NOC, are being targeted.
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It had happened – on several occasions – also between April 2019 and October 2020, when the closures were ordered by the men of General Haftar, when in the game of mutual raids, Wagner, the Russian contractor company used by the Kremlin when it cannot send soldiers from its army directly.
A flywheel for the price
The stop on exports becomes a driving force for the price. And it is inevitable given that production has seen a sharp decline, with daily exports ranging between 365 thousand and 409 thousand barrels per day, which means a decrease of 865 thousand barrels per day compared to production under “normal circumstances”, as Noc officially communicated.
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One wonders why what happens in Libya it has repercussions on the price of crude oil but not on that of gas. Because unlike oil, gas exports are smaller and very intermittent. Methane arrives in Europe through the pipeline Greenstreammanaged by Eni, which lands in Sicily a Gela: they could reach up to 10 billion cubic meters of raw material, but last year they were just over 3 billion. For this reason, the Italian government in its emergency plan for the replacement of Russian gas has taken into account that no more than 1 or 2 billion additional billion will arrive from Libya next year. © breaking latest news