Libya's Oil and Gas Minister, Abdurahman Benyezza stated that Libya intends to invest $10 billion on raising oil and gas production capacity from existing fields and $20 billion on new exploration over the next ten years.
Libya will also offer new production-sharing agreements to international oil companies on improved terms to existing contracts, but this won’t happen this year. There are no current plans to revise the terms of existing contracts with foreign oil companies, but there may be a process to equalise the terms of new and existing contracts in the future, he said.
This will be in part due to the elections which are rapidly approaching. Originally scheduled to be held Tuesday June 19, the elections will now run be held on July 7, when the Libyans will elect a national assembly to draft the constituion and appoint a transitional government.
“At the moment we are working on the (contract) models. We’ll have to study and see where we can improve,” Mr. Benyezza told reporters at the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries International Seminar in Vienna. "Production-sharing agreements will be the main type of contracts of course. New ones will not be (offered) this year.”
Whether existing contract holders will also be offered the same terms as newcomers has yet to be decided, he said.
“We are not in a process to change (existing) agreements at this time,” he said. But in the future existing terms will be evaluated, “not to create inequality of contracts,” he added.
(Source: Tripoli Post)
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