By Libya Herald reporters.
Tunis, 28 November 2017:
National Oil Corporation (NOC) chief Mustafa Sanalla has been in Cairo seeking to ginger up cooperation with Egypt to help repair and expand Libya’s creaking oil and gas infrastructure.
The meeting with Egyptian oil minister Tarek El Mollah looked at ways that Egyptian oil services companies might become involved in rehabilitating oil and gas infrastructure as well as building new tanks, plus a host of other services such as training and organising conferences and exhibitions.
Sanalla’s talks with El Mollah came seven months after he and Presidency Council (PC) deputy head Ahmed Maetig separately hosted Egyptian oil chiefs in Tripoli.
It was agreed then that Egyptian companies that had withdrawn after 2014 should return. A joint working group was created to see how this could best be managed.
However, the online Egypt Oil & Gas, said the visitors also had a shopping list which included the supply, not just of crude but of diesel and jet fuel, most of which Libya must itself import. NOC never confirmed the Egyptian news report, which was doubted, if only because in April, NOC could not meet its existing contractual arrangements.
However, NOC’s extraordinary quintupling of output from a low of 200,000 bpd in the summer of 2016 to the magic million this June, may have changed the picture for supplies to Egypt. After today’s Cairo talks, the Egyptian oil ministry said it had been agreed the first of a series of specialised technical meetings with NOC would be held in January. No further details were given and no reference was made to any type of oil supply.
