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Wintershall is sending a clear signal of its commitment to building a New Libya: together with the Libyan National Oil Corporation (NOC), Germany’s largest, internationally active crude oil and natural gas producer is building a new pipeline which will connect oil production from the Wintershall concession C96 and the oil field Nafoora, operated by the Libyan oil company Arabian Gulf Oil Company (Agoco), with the Amal field. From there the crude oil will be transported to the export port Ras Lanuf. Wintershall plans to lay the approx. 4,000 parts of the 55-km-long pipeline right through the desert by spring 2013. This means that for the first time a foreign operator, Wintershall, is coordinating the realization of a pipeline project on behalf of the Libyan National Oil Company (NOC).

The commissioning of the new pipeline in the spring of 2013 aims to relieve the bottleneck in export capacities. “Current oil production is already well above our expectations,” Chairman of the Board of Executive Directors, Rainer Seele, said at an energy conference in Berlin. Wintershall’s daily production is at an average 85,000 barrels per day. The company plans to further stabilize production capacity at this level by the end of 2012. “Overall, oil production may still fluctuate, since it depends on the availability of export infrastructure in the country. However, fortunately, Wintershall was able to gain additional capacities in export pipelines in recent weeks,” the Wintershall CEO explained.

Wintershall is also making an important contribution to stabilizing the energy supply in Libya. It is one of just a few companies that does not flare the associated gas produced during oil production in the desert, but collects it all via central processing plants and sends it on to power plants to be used for electricity generation. “We re-started operations at the facility to process the so-called associated gas early and now transport the gas through pipelines to power plants on the Mediterranean coast. The gas is used there to generate the electricity needed to supply the Tripoli region,” Seele said.

Wintershall operates in eight onshore oil fields in the Libyan Desert 1,000 kilometers south-east of the capital Tripoli in concessions 96 and 97. Wintershall also has a working interest in the offshore oil field Al Jurf (Block C 137) off the coast of Libya.