Libya is one of the most unreliable oil producers in OPEC and outside it. Production outages are a frequent occurrence as various armed groups vie for power over the country’s oil riches. Yet despite continued political instability and a deep economic crisis, Libya’s National Oil Corporation has ambitious goals: by the end of 2019, its chairman Mustafa Sanalla told Bloomberg recently, NOC plans to pump 1.6 million bpd of crude, the level of production from the times before the 2011 civil war. And that’s not all. Further down the road, Sanalla has said earlier, plans are to boost production to 2 million bpd by 2022 and even more later. As doubtful as this may seem at first glance, NOC may have good reason to make these plans. Earlier this year some of Libya’s largest fields suffered outages resulting from militant attacks, pipeline blockades, and even excessive heat in late […]