A major oil field in Libya came to a complete halt as political tensions resurfaced in the nation that sits atop Africa’s largest reserves.
The Sharara field in the southwest of the country started to shut down on Thursday afternoon and stopped completely overnight, according to a person familiar with the matter. Oil prices jumped after the news.
The march was stopped by protesters who are unhappy with the arrest of an official who is trying to become the head of Libya’s central bank. Waha, where production is similar to Sharara, is further east. Various factions in the country have formed alliances in the past if they share political goals, although it is unclear if that is the case this time.
Libya has lurched from one crisis to another since the 2011 civil war and the overthrow of strongman Moammar Gaddafi. Oil production has been highly volatile, with armed groups regularly shutting down fields.
The country has remained more stable since a truce in a civil war in the mid-2020s, with crude output above 1 million barrels per day for most of this year. Even so, Libya remains divided between rival administrations. In addition, there are hundreds of foreign mercenaries in the country, including some belonging to Russia’s Wagner Group, who control access to oil fields and ports.
The latest outage at Sharara means some of Africa’s oil supply has been halted over the past 24 hours. A nearby but smaller Libyan camp, El Feel, was shut down earlier Thursday as part of the same protest.
In Nigeria, the continent’s main producer, the Forcados terminal had to be shut down while the cause of a possible leak was inspected. Together, the disruptions in Libya and Nigeria account for more than 500,000 barrels per day of oil flow, about 0.5% of global supply. In all three cases, a timeline for a full reboot is unclear.
Sharara and the Waha field pump similar amounts of oil. Before the outage, Sharara had about 250,000 to 260,000 barrels per day and Waha about 280,000 to 290,000 barrels per day. The El Feel field handles between 60,000 and 70,000 barrels per day.
In addition, Forcados oil flows from Nigeria have averaged about 225,000 barrels per day so far this year, according to loading plans seen by Bloomberg.
–With the help of Paul Wallace.
