Libya's National Oil Corp declares force majeure on largest oil field after shutdown by militia
Libya's southwestern Sharara field previously had a 300,000 barrel per day output, and was restarting production gradually after reopening on Saturday.
Workers at the massive Sharara oil field have shut it down at the demands of the armed group's leader Mohamed Khalifa, who is linked to the renegade general Khalifa Haftar's Libyan National Army, the instigator of a violent power struggle with Libya's UN-recognized government that's lasted more than a year. Haftar's forces pulled back in May after a prolonged campaign to capture the capital Tripoli failed.
On Sunday, commodities analyst Edward Bell at Emirates NBD wrote that "a ceasefire between competing factions in the country should allow output to bounce back quickly." But he was blunt and quite prescient about the risks to its stability, adding that "the political dynamics in the country remain fluid and we would be very hesitant to assume stable output of around 1m b/d for the rest of 2020.
Libya's National Oil Corporation runs Sharara jointly with France's Total, Austria's OMV, Norway's Equinor and Spain's Repsol.Nine years after a U.S.-led coalition toppled Muammar Gaddafi, Libya remains a fractured state, ravaged by civil war and terrorism. And a vast array of competing foreign interests have entered the Libyan arena, including Turkey, Russia, Qatar, France, Italy, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt.
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