NARCO Analysis: Libya's 1mbpd Question (Part Two)

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

 

Back in July NARCO put out some analysis about Libya having reached that magic 1mpbd production milestone. The thrust of NARCO’s analysis was that Libya – largely through the singlehanded, Herculean efforts of NOC Chairman Mustafa Sanalla – had managed to cobble together a meaningful level of production after years of lost potential. But NARCO had serious reservations about how stable that production was.

The source of NARCO’s concern was that there was no overarching structural change in Libya’s oil sector that could account for the production increase. Instead, there were a series of independent temporal changes. Temporal changes being, well, temporal, there was always the possibility that these changes would be reversed. And given how fluid the Libyan environment is, that possibility was quite high. Which is how we got to where we are now. Libyan production is not in the 200kbpd range where it was a year ago, but it’s also well shy of the 1mbpd mark it hit two months ago. In short, Libyan production is up net +/-400kbpd over the last twelve months, but still down about 1mbpd from 2010.

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