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Libya is enduring what has become an annual summer power supply crisis. The gap between supply and demand has grown to its highest level since the crisis began. On 7 August, General Electric Company of Libya (Gecol) estimated that peak load was approximately 6,950MW while maximum generation capacity was 5,100MW, leading to a deficit of 1,850MW, considerably more than in 2016. Last year, available capacity was 4,600MW-5,000MW while the maximum load was approximately 5,700MW-6,000MW, resulting in a deficit of between 700MW and 1,400MW.

National Oil Corporation (NOC) lifted a blockade of the pipelines leading to and from the Az-Zawiya refinery west of Tripoli in a matter of hours in early August, demonstrating that it still has the leverage to guarantee security at its facilities. Thanks to a combination of dogged technical effort and the rapid defusing of security issues, the corporation has lifted oil production to 1.1m b/d, achieving the short-term target set by chairman Mustafa Sanalla at the start of the year.

Is anyone listening to National Oil Corporation (NOC) chairman Mustafa Sanalla? He has issued repeated appeals to the international community to change its approach to the crisis in Libya to help his institution to better carry out its functions and to protect the interests of the Libyan people.At Chatham House in January, he described NOC as “the best guarantee that Libya will remain as a unitary state” and called for the international community to support its independence.

Libya’s National Oil Corporation (NOC) has said it expects production to reach 1m b/d by mid-July, despite the massive political, financial and security challenges that threaten to impede its ability to function normally. The corporation is currently pumping an average of 830,000 b/d, and is targeting production of 1.25m b/d by mid-August. A 13 June deal to resume production from Wintershall’s concessions has, for the time being, confirmed NOC’s practical authority over the negotiation of production contracts with its international partners.

National Oil Corporation (NOC) chairman Mustafa Sanalla has written to the head of the parallel Al-Baida-based interim government Abdullah Al-Thinni, warning him not to use Qatar’s diplomatic crisis as a pretext for illegal oil exports. The diplomatic crisis unfolding in the Gulf – with Qatar now diplomatically and physically isolated by Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE and many of their allies because of its support for Islamist groups including the Muslim Brotherhood – resonates in Libya because the Gulf factions have used Libya as a proxy conflict for their differences over the past five years.

General Electric Company of Libya (Gecol) is bracing itself for the summer peak demand period, with lengthy outages already occurring in Tripoli and elsewhere as temperatures increase. The state-owned utility is dealing with a legacy of conflict damage, ongoing theft and vandalism, squeezed maintenance budgets and massive delays to its programme of building new generation and transmission infrastructure. It has also complained about fuel shortages.In mid-May, Gecol issued a statement “imploring” National Oil Corporation (NOC) to urgently restart supplies of gas and fuel oil needed for power generation.

National Oil Corporation (NOC) chairman Mustafa Sanalla has intensified his conflict with Presidency Council head Fayez Al-Sarraj, alleging that German oil company Wintershall has formed an alliance with the UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) and succeeded in influencing the drafting of legislation for its commercial benefit. In a statement published on NOC’s website on 10 May, Sanalla said that, following the breakdown of negotiations over the renewal of its concessions, Wintershall had “shut in over 160,000 b/d of production, at a cost to the Libyan state of almost a quarter of a billion dollars per month”.

National Oil Corporation (NOC) chairman Mustafa Sanalla has pushed production of crude to 760,000 b/d, its highest level for nearly two and a half years. But while he is achieving results, his pragmatic vision for the development of a depoliticised oil sector has yet to gain support from the United Nations and the dominant international powers or from the Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli.

Eni has made a new gas and condensate discovery in the Gamma prospect in the Tripoli-Sabratah Basin. The discovery in Contract Area D, 140km offshore from Tripoli, was made with the B1 16/3 well at a site 15km south-west of the Bouri field and 5km north of the Bahr Essalam field. The drilling of the Gamma prospect is part of Eni’s near field exploration strategy, targeting opportunities close to existing infrastructure, reducing the time to market and providing additional gas for the local market and for export, the company said.

National Oil Corporation (NOC) is beset on every side by attacks on its independence. Each of the main factions in Libya’s civil conflict is determined to bring control over oil production and export within its own grasp, despite the newly established international quartet’s unanimous support for the principle that the sovereign institutions should remain free of political interference. On 27 March, NOC chairman Mustafa Sanalla strongly rejected a resolution passed by the Presidency Council of the Government of National Accord (GNA) placing the corporation under the control of a newly proposed oil ministry.

The main reason why Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar was expected to keep Libya’s Sirte Basin oil facilities free of conflict was that intelligence supplied by the Egyptians enabled him to destroy any attacking forces from the air, long before they came in range. On the day that the Benghazi Defence Brigades moved in to Ras Lanuf and Sidra, either the pair of drones which supply this intelligence were not working, or Cairo failed to pass on the warning

On 3 March, the Benghazi Defence Brigades (BDB), a largely Islamist militia opposed to Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, gained control of the Ras Lanuf and Sidra oil terminals and held them until they were driven out again by Haftar’s Libyan National Army on 14 March. Haftar first took over the facilities in September after driving out the militia commanded by Ibrahim Al-Jathran, who had blockaded them for the previous two years.

The agreement between Greece’s Metka and a body calling itself the General Authority for Electricity and Renewable Energy of Libya (Gaerel) to build a 500MW open-cycle power plant in Tobruk shows that some in eastern Libya have not given up their ambition of wresting control of vital state institutions from Tripoli. However, the politics behind the deal are confused and, without access to the budget, it is hard to see how it can go ahead. Meanwhile, the Tripoli-based General Electric Company of Libya (Gecol) has succeeded in adding new capacity and reuniting the network into a single grid.

Libya’s National Oil Corporation (NOC) has come up with a bold plan to restore output to pre-revolution levels by the end of this year. If it succeeds, the corporation will have effectively established itself as the bedrock of a united Libya while staving off an otherwise inevitable economic collapse and worsening of the civil conflict. The plan requires NOC to take on greater executive authority while attracting a new wave of foreign investment, something that until recently was all but unthinkable.

Eni spudded the B1-16/3 exploration well in contract area D of the offshore NC41 area in the Mediterranean north of Tripoli on 4 January. The area was granted to Eni North Africa under the EPSA IV contract model signed with National Oil Corporation (NOC) in June 2008.The well will be drilled in water depths of 156 metres, about 5km north of the Bahr Essalam gas field. NOC said it expected the well to be drilled to a total depth of 3,007 metres