Libya Wants $40 Billion and 2 Million Barrels a Day. Drones Are Hitting Its Refineries Right Now.

Libya's National Oil Corporation wants the world to see a country open for business. It just got a fire instead.

On Aug. 11, a drone loaded with explosives hit a diesel tank at the Zawiya oil complex west of Tripoli, according to Libya's state news agency LANA. The NOC said it was the fifth such attack. A separate strike collapsed a tank holding about 1.2 million gallons of gasoline, and another drone hit a power substation at Zawiya's electrical facility, according to the state-run General Electricity Company of Libya, as reported by Libyan outlet Libyaakhbar and covered by the Epoch Times and Fox News. Nobody has claimed responsibility.

General Electric, the U.S. company that maintains the Zawiya power plant, pulled its personnel out "until security conditions and a suitable and safe work environment are ensured," GECOL said. The NOC said fuel supplies were not affected, but warned it could declare force majeure if the drone attacks on Zawiya's energy infrastructure keep happening.

Force majeure is the legal trigger that lets Libya suspend export contracts without penalty when war or disaster makes delivery impossible. The NOC has leaned on it before during Libya's near-constant cycles of blockades and militia standoffs.

The Investment Pitch

None of that stopped NOC chairman Masoud Suleiman from making his case to Bloomberg, in an interview published by OilPrice.com. Suleiman said Libya's current production has climbed to roughly 1.4 million barrels per day, the country's best mark in 12 years, and he wants to hit 2 million bpd by the early 2030s. Libya peaked at 3.4 million bpd in the early 1970s, before decades of sanctions, war and mismanagement gutted the industry.

Suleiman told Bloomberg that Libya's unified 2026 budget, negotiated with U.S. assistance, hands the NOC an operating budget north of $2 billion, or roughly 13 billion Libyan dinars, according to IndexBox's summary of the interview. That's a real change. The NOC got zero allocation in the 2025 budget. Suleiman called the earlier funding drought a source of real difficulty for the company and its foreign partners, and said that period is over.

Separately, OilPrice.com's own reporting put a bigger number on the table: Libya is seeking up to $40 billion to fund the broader expansion to 2 million bpd. That figure is significantly larger than the $2 billion operating budget Suleiman cited to Bloomberg, and the sourcing suggests the $40 billion figure covers the full scope of infrastructure, drilling and partnership investment needed across the sector, not just the NOC's annual operating funds. The two numbers describe different things, and readers should not confuse a one-year operating budget with a multi-year capital target.

Foreign companies are showing up regardless. Breitbart reported that ExxonMobil signed a memorandum of understanding with the NOC covering geological surveys off Libya's northwestern coast, marking the oil giant's first real re-engagement since it scaled back operations in 2013 over security concerns. BP and Shell signed similar MOUs earlier this year. Last year Libya ran its first oil-block licensing round in 18 years, landing exploration and production-sharing deals with Repsol, Turkish Petroleum, Eni, QatarEnergy and MOL, according to 360 Angola and IndexBox. NOC also confirmed with Austria's OMV that the Essar oil discovery is commercially viable.

A Country Still Split in Two

Libya has been functionally divided since the 2011 NATO-backed uprising that killed Muammar Gaddafi, an intervention in which then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton played a central diplomatic role, as Breitbart and the Epoch Times both noted, citing her on-camera remark "we came, we saw, he died" after Gaddafi's death.

Today the NOC answers to the U.N.-recognized Government of National Unity in Tripoli, led by Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah. A rival administration in Tobruk, aligned with warlord Khalifa Haftar and his Libyan National Army, wants control of the same oil wealth. Breitbart reported that gunmen from a militia camped near Tripoli stormed NOC headquarters in May 2025 demanding jobs, and got arrested when the company wasn't hiring. The Tobruk-based rivals have floated declaring their own force majeure on oil fields to pressure Tripoli.

Libya holds Africa's largest proven oil reserves, at 48 billion barrels as of early 2024, representing 41% of the continent's total, according to the Epoch Times. A 2024 Small Arms Survey report cited by the Epoch Times found that armed groups based in Zawiya itself have taken on a growing role in the country's power struggles, which raises an uncomfortable question for anyone writing checks to the NOC: some of the instability threatening the refineries may be coming from groups embedded in the same coastal region the oil majors are being asked to invest in.

Whether ExxonMobil, BP and Shell move past MOUs into actual drilling depends on whether Zawiya stops catching fire. The NOC hasn't identified who's behind the drone strikes, and as of today no group has claimed them. That's the unresolved question hanging over every dollar of that $40 billion ask.