“After OPEC, I look forward to returning home to my country, Libya…I love my country, and if you love your country, you do so through times of crisis just as you do in good times.”
When Pipeline Magazine was lucky enough to meet with OPEC secretary-general – and proud Libyan – Abdalla El-Badri in recent days, the troubled nation’s challenges as it emerges from the conflict, attempting to restore its vital oil production, thereby kickstarting its economy, was naturally a big topic of discussion.
Given the former Gaddafi –led nation’s OPEC membership and its importance to the global oil supply, energy industry commentators have been fixated by arguably the biggest story to hit oil & gas pages in the last decade, more recently by the immense challenges that lie ahead.
Here at Pipeline, we’ve covered this extensively too. Since I joined in July, we’ve covered Libya while still in mid-conflict within our July GeoFocus: North Africa feature and also in our most recent October issue, where we touched on the huge logistical difficulties that lie ahead for the new Libya – along with its numerous mentions in our news stories and some in the pre-July magazine.
But in my recent conversation with Mr El-Badri, it was the human element rather than the economic that made perhaps the greatest impression, through his solitary sentence about returning home to Libya, one among so many, and uttered toward the end of our meeting.
While we discussed the fraught issue of forecasting a significant return to oil production, among global energy demand forecasts and other topics, it occurred to me afterwards just how many times El-Badri must have been asked the market-related questions since the conflict began in February.
But for all the numbers we’ve heard bandied around by OPEC, the IEA, the EIA and other acronym-intensive organisations, it was perhaps these final comments that resonated most strongly.
Pride in his home country was clearly evident on Mr El-Badri’s face as he said these words, with similarly positive sentiments revealed in other comments, such as his unwavering confidence in the abilities and expertise of his countrymen’s oil & gas workers to get the oil flowing once again.
While the rest of the world adopts a somewhat skeptical wait-and-see approach, OPEC’s head seems to hold no doubts at all in the nation’s ability to bounce back quickly. Only time will tell.
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