By Kjetil Malkenes Hovland
STAVANGER, Norway--German oil and gas company Wintershall AG
said Wednesday it was ready to restart oil production in Libya at
any time, but said unrest was still blocking access to export
infrastructure such as pipelines and harbors.
"At the moment, our assets are safe, they're all closed in,
they're being maintained and looked after so that they can start
production as soon as we have the export capacity available--that's
pipelines, harbors and so on," Martin Bachmann, a member of
Wintershall's executive board, told The Wall Street Journal at the
sidelines of the Offshore Northern Seas energy conference.
Recent violence in Libya has targeted residential areas, public
facilities and infrastructure, and is the worst since 2011, when
former president Moammar Gadhafi was ousted.
Governments lacking a strong police force or unified military
have relied on militias to try to maintain order. A recent uptick
in violence stems from the empowerment of the militias as well as a
backlash by Islamist factions that lost power in June parliament
elections. Wintershall said it was awaiting signals from Libya's
national oil company on the access to pipelines.
"There are basically local arguments between the different
tribes along the route," said Mr. Bachmann. "This infrastructure is
topic of those disputes."
Despite the unrest, pipelines in Libya are still intact, Mr.
Bachmann said. Asked how long it would take to ramp up
Wintershall's production to the capacity of about 100,000 barrels a
day, he said "it's not years, it's rather months."
Wintershall, a wholly owned subsidiary of German chemical
company BASF SE (BAS.XE), has been drilling in Libya since 1958 and
is among the country's biggest oil producers. It operates eight
onshore fields in the eastern part of the country, with the oil
being transported by pipeline to export terminals at the coast.
Its entire onshore production of oil and associated gas was
suspended last summer due to strikes and blockades at the export
terminals, but the company said production at its part-owned
Al-Jurff offshore field wasn't affected.
Mr. Bachmann said Wintershall's oil and gas activities in Russia
weren't affected by international sanctions, being based on local
contractors and equipment. But Europe and Russia needs "to break
out of the sanctions cycle, of tit-for-tat," he said, as Europe has
no alternatives to Russian gas.
"If we decided today we want the gas from somewhere else...it
would take 30 years before we could achieve that. So when we talk
about energy supply in five years, 10 years, we need to worry about
keeping the partnership with these suppliers," he said.
Write to Kjetil Malkenes Hovland at
kjetilmalkenes.hovland@wsj.com
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