Libya’s reservoirs are ageing even when prices are kind. Depletion is not a drama; it is the quiet, relentless fall in deliverability as pressure slips and water rises. The choice for operators is stark. Either decline is allowed to become a cliff, with outages dressed up as fate, or it is turned into a slope by doing ordinary things well – maintaining pressure support, keeping surface systems clean, stabilising power, and measuring what actually flows.
In a world that still needs new supply each year simply to replace lost output, barrels that arrive predictably and cheaply have a premium. Libya is built for that premium. Its geology is conventional; lifting costs are modest; much of the installed kit works when cared for. The work is not romantic, but it is bankable.
The economics of ordinary competence
What slows decline in Libya is not a miracle technique; it is rhythm. Floods that are balanced and watched recover more oil than floods run on hope. That means injectors tuned to maintain voidage, water fronts steered rather than guessed, and surveillance frequent enough to make small corrections early. Surface integrity does the rest.
A surprising share of “reservoir under-performance” is simply back-pressure from tired equipment – separators out of spec, produced-water plants undersized for today’s volumes, flowlines that have become chemistry experiments. Replace corroded pipe, restore piggability, size water systems for the field as it is rather than as it was, and wells behave like wells again. Power is the hinge. Pumps and compressors do not fail gracefully when voltage sags. Capture associated gas, reinject where rock benefits, and where it does not, run turbines and keep the estate alive. A field that powers itself with its own molecules spends less on diesel, loses fewer hours to brownouts, and extends the life of its machines. None of this wins applause on day one; all of it compounds on day 200.
Demand’s awkward persistence
It is fashionable to predict a swift glide away from liquids. It is also wrong in the timeframes that matter for investment. Heavy transport, aviation, fertiliser and petrochemicals change slowly because their assets live for decades and their substitutes are capital-intensive. Prices will fall and rise – affordability caps demand, scarcity exposes spare capacity as theatre – but the system still needs fresh barrels to replace what depletion takes. The barrels that clear this reality are short-cycle, low-marginal-cost and operationally dull. Libya’s best projects fit that description if governance holds. They can be turned up without building empires of new steel, and turned down without crippling balance sheets. That makes them attractive to buyers who value reliability over rhetoric and to financiers who price monotony as a virtue.
A Libyan operating model that lasts
If the slope of decline is the thing to manage, Libya’s model is simple. Treat floods as operating assets with owners and dashboards, not as finished projects. Make integrity a budget line that reflects physics, not hope. Run a rolling programme of workovers and recompletions that delivers small gains often, rather than heroic interventions once in a while. Capture gas and use it – as pressure support where justified and as power where not – so electrons are as reliable as intentions. Above all, take measurement seriously. Well tests reconciled to tanks, pressures and rates recorded to cadence, allocations that close and are believed – this is how capital gets cheaper and arguments shorter. Auditors trust what they can read; traders trust what settles on time; boards trust programmes that miss fewer surprises.
Qabas reads the problem this way and backs it. The firm is bluntly long oil in Libya, not because it ignores transition, but because it recognises the arithmetic of depletion and the assets at hand. Its bias is towards the disciplines that lengthen field life and lower unit cost – pressure support that is measured rather than asserted; surface systems sized for today’s water, not yesterday’s dreams; power quality treated as a subsurface variable; and gas turned from nuisance to advantage. It prefers rehearsal to heroics – black-start drills and restart routines that make bad Tuesdays survivable – and it writes governance that converts good intentions into habits. Exceptions expire; parameters have owners; changes leave receipts. The aim is institutional memory: fields that behave the same on Thursday as they did on Monday.
None of this requires a manifesto. It requires a partner willing to be judged by dull graphs – decline gentler than last year, outages shorter, flaring lower, end-of-day closed on time. That is Qabas’s pitch. It designs brownfield programmes that pay back within quarters, sets up flood management that answers to numbers rather than narrative, electrifies hubs so pumps live longer than a news cycle, and builds the telemetry spine that turns a field from a story into an instrument. The message is unfashionable and correct: Libya should produce more oil for longer – reliably, cleanly and at a cost the market will pay – while using the proceeds to build whatever comes next. On that path, depletion is not destiny; it is a managed slope. And the institutions that manage it will be the ones earning trust when the world again rediscovers that spare capacity is a rumour and dependable barrels are scarce.