East Libyan AGOCO’s Oil Production Rises To 320,000 Bpd

In a sign that Libya may very soon add even more crude to the global oil glut, spokesman Omran al-Zwai told Reuters on Monday that Libya’s Arabian Gulf Oil Company (AGOCO) had increased its crude output to 320,000 barrels per day (bpd) from 290,000 bpd late last week.

Early last week, Benghazi-based AGOCO - a unit of the National Oil Corporation (NOC) operating mainly in the eastern part of the country – had raised its production by 50,000 bpd to 261,000 bpd, al-Zwai had told Reuters.

In its latest estimate for two fields, AGOCO reckons that output at the Sarir oil field had risen to some 200,000 bpd, while production at the Nafoura field was 29,000 bpd, al-Zwai said. Should the Bayda field come on line, AGOCO may reach its goal to produce 350,000 bpd by year-end, according to the spokesman.

AGOCO’s production has more or less doubled since the eastern commander and head of the Libyan National Army (LNA), General Khalifa Haftar, seized control of the country’s oil ports in the east and handed them over to the NOC last month. The NOC has said that it would ramp up production and exports to 950,000 bpd before the end of this year. That’s up from the 250,000 bpd Libya was exporting before Haftar took over control of the ports from the Petroleum Facilities Guard (PFG), which is affiliated with the UN-backed Government of National Accord.

A couple of days after the ports were handed over to the NOC, the national company lifted the force majeure at the four ports in the so-called Oil Crescent.

If no significant outages at oil facilities occur, Libya will only be increasing its production and exports by the end of the year, and it doesn’t even have to comply with an OPEC output cap deal, because it has been exempted from cuts, given the violence that has taken so much oil offline so far.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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