Libyan Oil Exports Settle into New Routine

Eastern Libyan state oil firm AGOCO is producing 250,000 to 290,000 barrels per day (bpd), a company spokesman said on Sunday, unchanged from recent weeks.

On Monday, a tanker will lift one million barrels of crude at the port of Hariga, the spokesman said. He said the Nafoura field remained closed due to a protest by locals demanding jobs.

The Bayda field also remained shut due to a shortage of power, he said.

AGOCO produces the bulk of Libya's total oil output which ranges from 400,000 to 500,000 bpd. More than a dozen fields in central and western Libya have closed due to protests and fighting, including Islamic State attacks.

Another tanker would lift 500,000 barrels of crude from the eastern Brega port, another oil official said. The port mainly supplies the western Zawiya refinery.

There was no tanker activity at the eastern port of Zueitina as crude flows remain disrupted due to the protest that has halted work at the Nafoura field, said a port official.

The southwestern El Sharara oilfield will remain closed, said Ibrahim al-Tebawi, a member of a security force from the western region of Zintan blocking a pipeline from the field. A rival force must leave El Sharara before pumping can resume.

El Sharara closed in November when a force allied with a self-declared government in Tripoli took over and Zintan guards, who had previously controlled the field, shut down a related pipeline.

The nearby El Feel field also remained shut due to a strike by guards, a field engineer said.

Libya is caught in a struggle between forces backing the internationally recognized government based in the east and a rival administration that has taken control of Tripoli, as former rebels who helped oust veteran ruler Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 have fallen out along political, regional and tribal lines.

In a bid to show its impartiality, Tripoli-based state oil firm NOC said it had begun delivering petrol to the western mountains, to which Zintan belongs, which had been cut off from fuel supplies.

Zintan is allied to the eastern government fighting the Tripoli government on a frontline west of the capital.

But Zintan's mayor, Mustafa al-Barouni, said he expected a Tripoli force to block the deliveries.

"I, the mayor of Zintan, think that Zintan will not receive fuel shipments because the troops of Libya Dawn have been preventing it for more than eight months," he told Reuters, referring to the faction which seized Tripoli last August.