Remember this?
How quickly times change! That was just six weeks ago, and if the Strait of Hormuz does not reopen, Europe is expected to be operating on empty jet fuel for another six weeks, as well as facing a number of other potential fuel shortages. Europeans face a difficult situation as it seems more likely that El Mandeb Gate will be officially closed than Hormuz will reopen. And there are already major fuel protests in Ireland that have shaken the government.
Europe is once again trying its magic on oil and gas supplies from Algeria to make up for lost volumes from the Middle East, but there are a number of issues that limit how much Algeria can soften the blow of the Hormuz shutdown.
But Algeria’s eastern neighbor has the world’s 19th largest known gas reserves (almost as much as Norway) and Africa’s largest proven oil reserves. But there’s a problem.
Back in 2011, EU countries helped turn Libya into a failed state. Sure they ended up stealing the country’s wealth and the slave market was booming, but the oil and gas market predictably collapsed. Oops. It could certainly be useful right now.
And besides all the deaths, slave markets, untold human suffering, destabilization of large parts of North Africa and the Sahel, and the refugee crisis, the loss of a reliable partner in the EU who could provide desperately needed resources is another reason why Libya’s collapse was a big mistake.
Prior to the country’s destruction by NATO and the brutal killing of the country’s former leader Muammar Gaddafi, Libya produced approximately 1.65 million barrels per day (bpd) of primarily high-quality, light sweet crude oil, which was in particular demand in the Mediterranean and northwest Europe, where Libya’s proximity to Europe is a major advantage in terms of ease and cost of transportation. In the years following the 2003 sanctions and before Libya’s collapse in 2011, nearly all Libyan oil was sold to European countries.
Production during this period was on the rise, but then collapsed and has not yet fully recovered.
Libya’s collapse of NATO also destroyed its nascent petrochemical industry. From a 2007 article in Middle East Business Intelligence:
Tripoli is focusing on two projects to upgrade existing facilities. Under a major contract signed in late April, a consortium of Dow and the National Oil Corporation (NOC) will completely renovate the Ras Lanuf petrochemical complex. Within days of that agreement, Yara signed a similar contract for the complete refurbishment of the ammonia and urea complex in Marsa El Brega.
The joint venture agreement is on track to be signed in early 2008 to enhance the existing main agreement for the two projects. The recruitment of two internationally recognized companies to bring the country’s existing infrastructure up to modern standards is no small feat, given years of international isolation and the chronic lack of investment in downstream infrastructure that characterizes this era.
Libya still had a way to go to develop the surplus gas supplies needed for a large-scale petrochemical program, but it could have easily been done already. Regarding gas, the amount supplied to Europe has declined from 9.26 billion cubic meters (bcm) in 2010 to 1.33 bcm in 2024, and although Libya has one pipeline heading to Italy, the amount actually flowing is far below its supply capacity. Cut off from much of Libyan and Russian gas, Italy has become increasingly reliant on Qatar, which is not doing so well.
It was announced this month that Tripoli and its chiefs will revive another pipeline project that has been stalled for 16 years since the EU helped destroy the country. This pipeline, along with improvements and stable supply of the existing GreenStream pipeline to Italy, could help Libya dramatically increase exports to Europe by 2030. But Libya remains a failed state and betting on supplies for the next four to five years is wishful thinking.
Washington brings peace and benefits to Libya…and expels Russians
The United States just conducted joint military exercises with the two rival factions that control the country. According to the Wall Street Journal, this was a sign that the United States was not only trying to keep Moscow out of Libya, but also that Washington was trying to bring peace to the failed state, allow the oil and gas industry to rebuild, and give American companies access to rare earths. A simple example of solar pumping:
It is hoped that the training will allow Libya to gain access to more training and equipment from the United States and its allies, eventually allowing it to stop relying on Russia and Belarus for equipment and mercenaries.
…Importantly, a reunified Libya may be emboldened to cut off air bridges that Russia uses to transfer personnel and weapons to its African allies, Western officials said, just as Russia withdrew in Syria after the overthrow of dictator Bashar al-Assad.
It sounds amazing, but the cold reality is:
We spoke to PRX #world About U.S.-supported joint military exercises #silte:
“Russia does not see the Trump administration as a great and formidable enemy. If inside Libya the Russians need to leave certain assets to free up space for purely superficial reasons… pic.twitter.com/honmHMWEu8
— Jalel Harchaoui Jalel (@JMJalel_H) April 16, 2026
And here is the Barcelona Center for International Affairs, which takes a broader view of the complexity of the situation and how difficult it is to put back together what the US and EU shattered into a million pieces 15 years ago.
Libya’s gas field development ambitions, particularly offshore, face major challenges that raise two questions. The first is whether Greece or Turkey will prevail in trying to impose their economic rights on the Eastern Mediterranean. The second question is which of the two senior political actors, Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, who rules eastern Libya, and Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, who heads the Tripoli government, will prevail, since “true sovereignty is currently exercised by controlling the central bank and oil (and gas) resources as weapons.”
Five years ago, Greece became a founding member of the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum (EMGF), along with Egypt, Israel, Italy, France, Cyprus, Palestine and Jordan, as multinational companies explored gas fields off the coast of Cyprus. Greece, a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), claims the right to a 200-mile exclusive economic zone around its thousands of islands. If supported, such a policy would lock in the hydrocarbon wealth of the eastern Mediterranean. Since 2006, Turkey has promoted the “Blue Homeland” (Mavi Vatan) doctrine. The project advocates a strategy to expand Turkey’s exclusive economic zone across the Black Sea, Aegean Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. It is used diplomatically as shorthand for Ankara’s insistence that the law of the sea should privilege continental land rights.
As Tarek Meghelisi notes, the risk of a showdown between the two claims is real: “Turkiye’s shrewd involvement in Libya, based on a maritime agreement that ignored even the territorial claims of major Greek islands like Rhodes and Crete, allowed Ankara to establish diplomatic, legal and military presence throughout the region. Greece relies on the solidarity of the European Union. Meanwhile, tensions between France and Turkey nearly escalated into war when the navies faced each other.” Since then, deft diplomacy has allowed Turkey, which was thwarted by Haftar’s conquest of Tripoli with military intervention in 2020, to sign a maritime agreement with the UN-recognized Libyan government, the Government of National Unity (GNU), which ignores Greek claims. The EU’s hostility to the deal shapes its policy toward Libya. To make matters even more confusing, neither Türkiye, Israel, Libya nor the United States are signatories to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
“The result was a weakening of Libya’s already fragile sovereignty. Instead of addressing the fundamental crisis of political legitimacy, foreign powers…manipulated Libya’s divisions to gain strategic advantage. As regional rivalries subsided, Turkiye leveraged these gains to gain broader access to the UAE, Egypt, and France, turning them into lucrative business and security deals on both sides of Libya’s divisions.”
the core of the problem
Since the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, the United States and its NATO allies have engaged in sabotage with countries over which they have no fiscal control, particularly those with large amounts of fossil fuel assets and targets for destruction. Iraq, Syria, Libya, Russia, Venezuela, Iran.
But by destroying, or more recently attempting to destroy, these countries, the West, especially Europe, is destroying itself as it struggles to cope with too many refugees and too few vital imports.
Let me remind you what happened in Libya.
The United States and Europe wanted Gaddafi not just removed, but dead.
1. Libya had no debt, but had a large amount of investment capital.
By claiming that these funds were secretly stolen by Gaddafi, the West confiscated the wealth that Libya had foolishly invested in the West.
Libya became food…
— Alternative News (@AlternatNews) February 23, 2026
And the fallout is causing widespread suffering and economic problems for countries on both sides of the Mediterranean, while some of the biggest Western companies benefit, the Barcelona Center for International Affairs has said again.
Foreign actors, including Italy’s ENI and American companies, are all involved in creating a situation in which “revenues are diverted through new intermediaries (and) Libya is erased from its own resource wealth, a symbol of external domination disguised as a partnership. Libyan oil is no longer a resource, but a hostage.” Europe is fueling chaos in the Mediterranean through agreements with local Libyan militias to curb migration, as Italy did in 2013. Libya is “an experiment in redefining the state from scratch, a laboratory of post-political modernity in the Arab world, where regimes do not collapse but fragment… into states ruled from the rubble.” It is contrary to realpolitik that Europe should consider developing new gas fields under these circumstances. Even if developed, such gas resources are by no means safe. The very concept of gas security is always at the forefront of the games played in Libya. Without sovereignty, energy resources turn from an asset to a liability.
In summary, Europe could have traded with Libya on a more equal footing. It may now be importing large quantities of oil, gas and other petrochemicals from Libya, as well as from Russia.
But the financial oligarchy that runs Europe and the United States, and even better, the countries, would rather burn down the world, including their own country, than give up their money and power.
