Libya’s Increased Oil Production Thwarts OPEC’s Reduction Plans<br />Last month the national oil company announced an aggressive three-phase development plan to lift Libyan output to 1.32 million<br />barrels a day by the end of 2017, to 1.5 million barrels a day by the end of 2018, and to 2.2 million barrels a day by 2023.<br />The German oil company Wintershall reached an interim agreement to settle a dispute with the National Oil Corporation of Libya last week to resume production in two fields<br />that potentially could combine to increase output by 160,000 barrels a day.<br />Libya, along with Iran and Nigeria, was excluded from the OPEC agreement to slash production last year by more than a million barrels a day.<br />But the seemingly ungovernable country has already undermined OPEC’s efforts to cut production, and now Libyan oil executives are projecting<br />that their production will reach a million barrels a day by the end of July, a level not seen in four years.<br />Contrary to the predictions of almost all experts, Libya’s production has climbed a wall of crisis in<br />recent months to 885,000 barrels a day last week, roughly triple its production of only a year ago.<br />The head of the eastern branch of the Libyan national oil company has accused Qatar of using its 8.5 percent stake in Glencore to divert the trading<br />company’s sales of Libyan oil to finance terrorists, a charge denied by Mustafa Sanalla, the chairman of the national oil company based in Tripoli.
