Arabian Gulf Oil Company (AGOCO), wholly owned by the National Oil Corporation of Libya, has completed repairs on a crude oil pipeline where a leak was detected at the end of May.
AGOCO completed the repairs on the Hamada-Zawiya crude oil pipeline, the company said on Thursday, as carried by Reuters.
Zawiya, which lies 25 miles west of Tripoli, is home to the largest operational refinery in the country with a capacity to process 120,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil. The Zawiya refinery is connected to the 300,000-bpd Sharara oilfield, Libya’s largest.
Following the leak on the Hamada-Zawiya pipeline, AGOCO halted the flow of crude.
Libya has been struggling with old oil and gas infrastructure as international majors shunned the country for more than a decade since the civil war began after the toppling of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
However, foreign majors are willing to go back if Libya’s first exploration bid round in 18 years is anything to go by.
Supermajors ExxonMobil, Chevron, TotalEnergies, and Eni are competing in Libya’s first oil bid round since 2007, Masoud Suleman, chairman of Libya’s National Oil Corporation (NOC), told Bloomberg in an interview published on Wednesday.
The majors are among the 37 international companies that have expressed interest in Libyan acreage for oil and gas exploration, NOC’s Suleman told Bloomberg.
“Almost all well-known international companies” are competing in the tender, the executive added.
Libya is offering a total of 22 blocks for exploration and development—11 offshore and 11 onshore blocks, including areas with undeveloped discoveries.
Libya holds an estimated 91 billion barrels of oil equivalent in undiscovered oil and gas resources, NOC says.
The country’s crude oil production is currently around 1.3-1.4 million bpd.
The national corporation looks to boost oil production to 2 million bpd within the next three years, “contingent on sufficient funding.”
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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