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Four more Egyptian embassy staff kidnapped in Libya: government

Four Egyptian embassy staff were kidnapped in Libya’s capital Tripoli on Saturday, a day after another Egyptian diplomat was seized there by gunmen, the Libyan government said. No group claimed responsibility for any of the abductions, but they came soon after a powerful Libyan militia reported its leader had been arrested in Cairo and threatened to retaliate. "Four more have been kidnapped. One of them is the cultural attache and the other three are staff," the Libyan Foreign Ministry spokesman said, without going into further details. Two years after Muammar Gaddafi’s fall, Libya is still in flux with the government struggling to control heavily-armed former rebels, militias and Islamist militants who fought in the uprising but often challenge Tripoli’s authority. One militia group, the Operations Room of Libya’s Revolutionaries, said on Friday its leader Shaban Hadia had been arrested in Egypt, where he had been travelling […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Mediterranean Oil Tanker Rates Near Six-Year High on Libya Cargo

The cost of shipping oil across the Mediterranean Sea surged to the highest in almost six years as traders accelerated bookings to load Libyan cargoes at a time when tankers are being delayed reaching the region. Aframax ships hauling 80,000 metric ton cargoes to southern European refineries from North African exporters are earning $137,687 a day, according to data today from Poten & Partners, a New York-based shipbroker. The figure is the most since March 2008, its data show. Nationwide protests shut Libyan oil fields and export terminals in July last year, curbing shipments from Europe ’s third-largest crude supplier. Some lost output is now returning and traders booked tankers to load 610,000 tons of Libyan oil in the week ended Jan. 26, the most since Sept. 1, according to charter lists compiled by Bloomberg. Fog is delaying ships at Turkey ’s shipping straits, meaning fewer in the Mediterranean, […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Libyan oil production up 2 percent

The Libyan Ministry of Oil said oil production has reached an average level of 581,657 barrels per day, a 2 percent increase from its previous estimate. The government said the 581,657 barrels per day average was achieved during the week ending Jan. 18. It beats the previous week’s average of 569,135 bpd, the Libya Herald reported Monday from Tripoli. Before the civil war in 2011, Libya produced on average 1.6 million bpd and was one of the premier oil producers in North Africa. The country has flirted with that level since widespread fighting ended in late 2011 but recent production levels have suffered because of internal conflict. Rebel groups in the east of the country, some of which helped topple the regime of Moammar Gadhafi , in November declared independence for the region known as Cyrenaica, which hosts some of Libya’s key oil […]

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Senior Libyan Official Assassinated, First Since Qaddafi Era

A Libyan deputy cabinet minister was killed by gunmen on Saturday evening in the first assassination of a senior government figure in the country since the ouster of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi more than two years ago. The deputy minister of industry, Hassan al-Droui, was hit by a spray of bullets in the former Qaddafi stronghold of Surt, which he had represented in the wartime transitional council and then in the elected Parliament. Assassinations of military and police officers, usually presumed to be the work of Islamist extremists, have been accelerating in the eastern cities of Benghazi and Darnah . But the government had usually been able to negotiate its way out of threats to central institutions or top officials, as it did with the kidnapping of Prime Minister Ali Zeidan from a Tripoli hotel a few months ago. Previous attempts to assassinate senior officials had all […]

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Libyan oil production rises to 600,000-650,000 b/d: minister

Libyan oil production has risen to 600,000-650,000 b/d from 546,108 b/d in early January, the Minister of Oil and Gas Abdulbari Arousi said on Monday. This follows the resumption of production from the major Sharara field in the west of the country. Arousi, on the sidelines of the Petrotech-2014 conference in the outskirts of New Delhi, said he could not give specific timing as to when production would return to 1.6 million b/d due to the closure of oil ports in the country. He however, did add that the port closures could end by the end of this month. He said that the port closures have so far amounted to a revenue loss of $9 billion due to the inability to export. State-owned National Oil Corp. had previously issued a statement which said: "Total production of crude oil on Tuesday, January 7, amounted […]

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Libyan Rebels Say Oil Companies Eager to Buy Crude From East

Rebels in east Libya , who last year declared the region semi autonomous, said oil companies are eager to buy their crude and offered to protect tankers after the government’s navy blocked one such vessel from loading. “Companies are fighting to make contracts,” Salem Al Jedran, whose brother Ibrahim is the self-appointed leader of Cyrenaica, Libya’s eastern coastal region, said by phone today. “We will use Es Sider, Hariga and Ras Lanuf,” he said, referring to three of the country’s largest export facilities that have been disrupted since the middle of last year. The region’s Libyan Oil and Gas Corp. sent a letter to international oil companies yesterday offering to ensure the safety of tankers loading at Es Sider, the biggest port. The notice was distributed days after a vessel was stopped from going to the facility by the central govermnent’s navy. Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zaidan said today […]

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Libyan oil crisis swells as militias refuse to end shutdown

Libya’s battered oil industry crisis appears to be escalating again, with armed separatist militants who have shut down vital facilities in the east since July now seeking to sell oil from rebel-controlled terminals, while the navy drove off with shellfire a Maltese-flagged tanker that tried to illegally load at one of the blockaded ports. The militias, who have set up their own "official government of Cyrenaica," named after the Roman province that covered eastern Libya, vowed in a letter sent to major international oil trading companies that they would "fully ensure the security and safety of any ship or tanker that will enter Libyan waters for oil lifting" at the major eastern port of es-Sider. That pledge rang a little hollow Sunday after the Libyan navy, controlled by the government in Tripoli in western Libya, fired warning shots at the tanker Baku and […]

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Libya Vows to Stop Rebel Plan to Sell Oil

The Libyan government and a rebel group stepped up rhetoric Wednesday as Tripoli responded to a vow by dissidents to sell oil with a threat to sink their cargoes. The exchange, which comes after Libya shot at a tanker it said was illegally entering its waters, raises concerns about whether the chaos that has more than halved oil production in the North African nation and rattled oil markets could get worse. On Sunday, the Libyan Navy stopped a tanker it said was about to load at the blocked Es Sider terminal—though the shipper said it had already renounced entering the oil port. The government has banned shippers from lifting oil at several ports in eastern Libya, including Es Sider, after they fell under the control of a rebel militia seeking autonomy for its region, Cyrenaica. Sunday’s incident and the verbal escalation that followed came as the rebels are making […]

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Libya Warns Oil Tankers Against Dealing With Militias

In a further escalation of tensions with the militias occupying Libya ’s oil facilities, Prime Minister Ali Zeidan on Wednesday threatened to sink any foreign tankers attempting to load oil supplies from seized port terminals. For nearly six months, most of Libya’s oil production and exports have been obstructed by militias in the eastern region of the country that are seeking to gain autonomy from the weak central government in Tripoli. Mr. Zeidan has repeatedly threatened to send the country’s nascent armed forces to dislodge the militias, but he opted to negotiate to retake control of three key export terminals with little to show for his efforts. But the war of words became more trenchant in recent days. Over the weekend, Libya’s navy apparently fired warning shots near a Malta-flagged tanker that government oil officials said was trying to load at the occupied eastern port of Es […]

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Western Libya oil production resumes

Oil production resumed at Libya’s Sharara field after a shutdown and is now at 205,000 barrels per day, a Libyan National Oil Corp. official said Monday. Mustafa Sanalla, a boad member of the company, said operations at Sharara, closed by protests in October, resumed during the weekend, the Platts energy news service reported. Protesters who forced the shutdown had demanded more local authority, officials said. "Today production is 205,000 bpd from Sharara," Sanalla said. The field in western Libya has the capacity to produce 350,000 bpd. Libya has struggled to return to its pre-civil war level of 1.6 million bpd because of national security issues. Platts reports there were no indications crude oil from Sharara has reached the export market. In 2012, the International Energy Agency called on its member states to tap into their strategic reserves to compensate for supply disruptions in […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple