Libya’s oil industry faces renewed turbulence

After a year of relative calm, chaos has returned to Libya with the cancellation of planned elections and the emergence of two rival prime ministers

The struggle between Libya’s sitting prime minister, Abdulhamid Dbeibeh, and the man parliament wants to replace him with, Fathi Bashagha, is likely to be protracted. Neither man seems likely to devise a cabinet acceptable to all of Libya’s armed factions, raising the possibility of a return to the civil war that was suspended by a UN-brokered ceasefire in 2020. This spells a period of uncertainty for the oil sector, as Libya’s National Oil Corporation (NOC) is caught in the country’s political battles. Elections had been set for 24 December 2021, the 70th anniversary of Libya’s independence, and were to have been the culmination of a two-year-long UN peace process. That process saw two warr