Libya will allow BP to begin drilling in its offshore deepwater region next month, despite the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill, AP quoted the head of Libya’s National Oil Co. as saying on Sunday.
Shokri Ghanem, who serves as Libya’s de facto oil minister, said the April explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig, and the subsequent spill, were “tragic, but the oil industry is also moving into new frontiers.”
“An accident will not stop us from digging in this new frontier,” Ghanem said. “Life must go on, but we will learn a lot of lessons.”
Ghanem’s comments are the latest confirmation by the OPEC nation that it was planning to honor the contract it signed with BP in 2007 to drill in the Libyan deepwater region of the Mediterranean Sea.
The embattled British supermajor said in September that it was entering the final stages of preparations for drilling on a major US$1.2 billion exploration block in Libya.
A senior spokesman from BP, Robert Wine, said at the time that seismic underground tests were almost complete at the site in the Sirte basin in northern Libya.
“We are coming to the end of the offshore seismic work, and then there is more ongoing seismic work on shore,” said Wine.
“We will then analyse the seismic [result] and work out the prospects for the first well to be drilled, that will be sometime next year.”
“The agreement we signed back in 2007 was an exploration commitment of $900 million, although we said at the time that it would probably be slightly more around $1.2 billion,” he added.
Wine also said that BP is confident that the site can be developed into a major oil producer for the company and that the investment could rise to $20 billion over the next 20 years. .
The BP deal in Libya has been attracting controversy in the UK after the release of the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al-Megrahi, on compassionate grounds from a Scottish prison was linked to the contract.
However, any link has been strongly denied by BP and both the UK and Libyan government.
