Libya partition jitters amid oilfield outage

Libya

TRIPOLI, April 11, 2017 – Speculation about a possible plan to partition oil-rich Libya appeared in international media on Monday, a day after the country’s largest oilfield went offline again after working for a mere week following a previous outage.

The El Sharara oilfield in south-western Libya, with a listed capacity of 330,000 bopd, has been operating intermittently at a fraction of its capacity since December last year, when a long-standing military dispute blocking the pipeline that connects it to the coast was said to have been resolved.

Despite this, the field, operated by a joint venture comprising Libya’s National Oil Corporation (NOC), Repsol, Total, OMV and Statoil, remains among the many examples of how violence from the chaotic civil war in the country continues to impact upon its crude production.

The latest outage at Sharara came just as news broke that an advisor to US President Donald Trump had informally suggested a plan for the partition of Libya to a high-ranking European diplomat.

The map, drawn on a napkin at an unspecified meeting during Trump’s transition period, suggested splitting the country in 3 parts along the lines that demarcated the pre-1911 Ottoman provinces that made up what is today Libya.

Those lines closely reflect today’s division between Eastern Libya, led by the Russian-leaning anti-Islamist general Klahifa Haftar and Western Libya, controlled by the UN-backed national unity government of Fayez al-Sarraj.

Adding to the chaos, countless smaller tribal and clan-based military groupings have mushroomed throughout the country, ushering in lawlessness and abuses.

“The latest reports of ‘slave markets’ for migrants can be added to a long list of outrages [in Libya],” Mohammed Abdiker, the head of operation and emergencies of the International Organization for Migration, told The Guardian on Monday.

Nevertheless, experts say that a formal partition of the country is unlikely to end the chaos and could in fact encourage further violence over borders and resources, including the lucrative oilfields and pipelines in Libya.

“This is like a litmus test of how much you know about Libya,” Mattia Toaldo, a Libya pundit at the European Council on Foreign Relations, commented on the news about the napkin map in a separate interview with The Guardian.

“If you the only thing you know is that it was cut into three, then it shows you are clueless about the situation in Libya.”