Local protesters blocked crude oil loadings at the Es Sider and Ras Lanuf ports in Libya on Tuesday, five engineers and a shipping source told Reuters, putting about 450,000 barrels per day of exports at risk.
In a statement addressed to the country’s state-run National Oil Corporation (NOC) dated Jan. 5, the protesters demanded the relocation of several oil company headquarters to the Oil Crescent region, calling for fair development of their coastal area to improve living conditions.
Ports in Libya’s hydrocarbon-rich Oil Crescent include Es Sider, Brega, Zueitina and Ras Lanuf, accounting for about half of the total exports from the country, while several oil companies are based in the capital Tripoli.
“All we want is equality,” one of the protesters Houssam El Khodor told Reuters. “The oil is produced in our regions and all we get from it is the toxic fumes.”
An NOC spokesperson did not immediately reply to a Reuters request for comment.
The disruption comes as the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, of which Libya is a member, is due to discuss its policy of gradually increasing oil output after U.S. President Donald Trump’s calls for OPEC to lower oil prices.
NOC said on its official X account on Tuesday that its crude production had reached more than 1.4 million bpd, about 200,000 bpd short of its pre-civil war high. It was not immediately clear if the blockade had affected production so far.
A loading programme seen by Reuters showed that Es Sider was on track to export about 340,000 bpd of crude in January, with another 110,000 bpd slated to ship from Ras Lanuf.
Brent crude prices were up 61 cents at $77.69 a barrel by 1232 GMT, with analysts citing the Libya outage as one of the reasons for the rise, though weak China manufacturing data and warmer weather in the northern hemisphere kept prices near two-week lows.
Protests have previously disrupted oil operations in Libya, forcing the shutdown in August, opens new tab last year of about 700,000 bpd of production in a dispute over the position of the central bank governor.
The shutdowns lasted for more than a month, with production gradually resuming from early October.
Source: Reuters (Reporting by Ayman Warfali, Jana Choukeir and Ahmad Ghaddar; Editing by Kirsten Donovan, Jan Harvey and Tomasz Janowski)