Marco Longari/AFP via Getty Images
An armed guard at tne Zawiya oil refinery in Libya.
Captain Imad Hatali raises himself to his full six feet, eyes narrowing, as he scans the shimmering desert from western
Libya’s key oil refinery.
Behind
Hatali are the gleaming white storage tanks of the Zawiya refinery,
which has a 120,000 barrel a day refining capacity and is run by the
state-owned Zawiya Oil Refining Company. In front of him are thousands
of miles of desert, the home of bandits, smugglers and suspected
al-Qaeda-linked militants who in January attacked
Algeria’s An Amenas gas plant and killed at least 38 foreign workers.
“Oil
is the lifeblood of Libya,” said Hatali, who leads the Petroleum
Facility Guard at the plant. “If anyone wants to come and attack, they
will need to get through me first.”
Short of men, the
government-run PFG is also handicapped by a lack of training, equipment
and even uniforms -- none have been issued and Hatali’s own well-fitting
U.S. Army-issue clothing is a gift from a friend. While militias
supplement the guards, they’re sometimes poorly disciplined --
ENI SpA (ENI) of
Italy,
joint operator of the Mellitah plant, halted gas exports after March 2
clashes between rival militias seeking to provide security there.
“A
lot of the sites, at the major facilities in Libya, if faced by an
organized and well-equipped group, would be potentially vulnerable,”
said Alan Fraser, Libya specialist at the London-based
AKE
risk consultancy. Sites most at risk are in the east, he said, where
Islamists killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three colleagues in
Benghazi in September.
Oil Dependence
Two years after the 2011 revolution that swept the late
Muammar Qaddafi
from power, the government is trying to revive an economy so dependent
on oil that it accounts for more than 70 percent of Libya’s gross
domestic product and about 90 percent of government revenue, the
International Monetary Fund says. The An Amenas attack has raised questions about the ability of security forces to protect that income.
“A
major attack on a Libyan oil installation would have severe
consequences, not just because the country depends so much on oil
exports, but because it would pull the rug out from foreign business
confidence,” Duncan Bullivant, chief executive officer of
Henderson Risk, a British security consultancy working in North
Africa, said. “Libya desperately needs outside expertise to overhaul its oil industry.”
Rising Production
Overall
production in Libya, which sits on Africa’s biggest oil reserves, rose
to 1.38 million barrels in January, according to the
International Energy Agency, and the Oil Ministry says it hopes to boost that to 2 million barrels a day by the end of 2015.
Libya
announced an expansion of the PFG to 12,000 after the Algerian attack
from the 3,000 it employed under the Qaddafi regime. The
Defense Ministry
relies on militiamen to boost numbers, and has sent militia units from
Zintan to help PFG units in the southwest at the Wafa gas plant and El
Feel, or the Elephant, run by Libya’s National Oil Co. and ENI.
International
oil companies active in Libya also include
Spain’s Repsol SA.,
ConocoPhillips (COP) of the U.S. and
Russia’s
Gazprom OAO. (GAZP)
The
lack of government manpower was illustrated when two militias vying for
the security contract for the gas facility at Mellitah, 35 miles (56
kilometers) west of Zawiya, clashed at the complex on March 2-3, causing
Eni to suspend gas through Libya’s main marine pipeline to Sicily and
elsewhere in
Europe.
‘Political Instability’
Most
of the guards at Zawiya, like the plant’s employees, are recruited from
what was one of the first towns to rebel against Qaddafi. The complex,
30 miles west of Tripoli, is sandwiched between Zawiya town, through
which runs the east-west coastal highway, and the sea.
Troops
man checkpoints at the plant entrance, amid sandbags and razor wire and
backed by six new white pickups, each mounting 14.5mm (.57 caliber)
anti-aircraft guns.
Inside their headquarters, the guard has a
recently installed security system, featuring 16 separate camera points,
each equipped with night vision, allowing the control room to
simultaneously monitor the entire perimeter.
Zooming in on a
fishing boat passing by the terminal, computer programmer Hassan Bashir,
22, checks the boat’s number and a simulated alert is passed to coastal
patrol craft. Then, demonstrating how cameras move on command, and
switch from day to night vision, he says: “You could see a mouse on
these screens.”
Plants Occupied
There is also a threat
to the pipelines running to fields in the south west. Along the
roadways that follow the pipelines, local tribes have built shacks,
creating cover should terrorists decide to strike.
“We want the shacks moved, we need to ensure we can patrol,” said Abdul Hamid El Bari, commander of the PFG’s Western Division.
Yet anti-government protests have been the main cause for concern at Libyan facilities, Fraser said.
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