More costs for refining, but no supply problems and modest impact on the oil bill. This is, according to what is estimated by the Petroleum Union, the risk linked to blockade of oil exports from Libya, decided by General Khalifa Haftar after the escalation of tensions in the North African country. For Italy, imports of crude oil from Libya account for 12% of total imports, and the Petroleum Union notes that in 2019, after the negative peak of 2016 when they dropped to 5% of the total, they grew compared to the years previous ones, since it is a historic and close source of supply (in 2007 and 2008 it had come close to 30% of total imports). In the specific of the crudes, the quantities coming from Libya last year came close to 7 million tons, with an increase of approximately 21% over the previous year.
Libyan crude oil, even if of particularly high quality, can in any case be replaced with others from various countries: Africa (Algeria, Nigeria, Gabon, Angola), the North Sea, Azerbaijan. However, as UP reveals, substitution involves slightly higher procurement costs, especially as regards transport costs, for obvious reasons: an estimate of the higher costs for the national refining system, on an annual basis, would be of the order of 60 million euros (about 1,3 dollars per barrel more). Which would be irrelevant as impact on the oil bill, estimated at around 0,2%.
But the problems unleashed by the Libyan crisis are wider: as is known, all the main Italian refineries import and process Libyan crude oil. The most exposed company is obviously Eni, so much so that recently the CEO Claudio Descalzi warned that the situation in Libya “is getting more complicated and there is concern because blocking production is like cutting off oxygen from the country and the population. It has already been 12 days – he said on Wednesday 29 January – that the production has been closed: I cannot decide, but the recommendation is to reopen it”. Recalling that the Berlin conference did not produce the desired results, Descalzi thus appealed to diplomacy and to the international community.
For Eni, the blockade is a further blow, after the El Feel plant in the south of the country was closed two months ago following the explosion of military tensions in an area just a few kilometers away. El Feel, of the Mellitah Oil and Gas joint venture (50% owned by Eni), is a field controlled by General Haftar, capable of daily production commonly estimated at 70-75 thousand barrels of oil. The plant has recently started working again, but with significant production cuts following the forced closure.
