After concluding brief and friendly talks with Libya's Government of National Unity, QatarEnergy has secured a potentially lucrative, and more importantly, geostrategic project in Libya. With Libya's conventional assets largely already under exploitation, and many of them located in the east of Libya, where rogue General Haftar holds altogether more sway than the Tripoli-based Government of National Unity--did we mention Libya now has two competing alleged unity governments under the 2021 ceasefire?--Qatar was forced to look for more exotic sources of petroleum and petroleum gas.

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The newly named "Dragut Field"--called by the same moniker as the Drawn Sword of Islam, the greatest Ottoman crusader and corsair to ever live, and sometime governor of Tripoli--is not some conventional field of the type common in nations like, say, Qatar. Instead, it is a relatively constrained tract of oil and gas bearing shale in the Ghadames Basin, near the border with Algeria, which holds some of the world's largest shale reserves. For anyone but Qatar, Algeria would be a more favorable environment--but Qatar's political advantages have truly come to play, with decades of support for Libya and Tripoli's government through various iterations allowing for us to work in a far more permissive regulatory atmosphere than Algeria, and one that understands that shale projects are by their very nature far different from the conventional oil that most developing petrostates are used to.

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With 48 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and 7.8 billion barrels of oil [all risked recoverable, of course], the Dragut Field is poised to become a significant player on the southern shores of the Mediterranean. The project is expected to come online in January 2027, though it will not reach its full scope until 2028, with shale wells allowing for rapid peaks in production. At capacity, the Dragut field will pump some 400,000 barrels of oil per day, along with supplying half a trillion cubic feet of gas annually through both the extant GreenStream and the new GreenStream II pipeline, to be constructed shortly with Italian approval.

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Politically, the Dragut Field is a shot across the bow at Haftar. Eastern Libya has managed to survive so far as a result of the complexities of its legal situation and the fact that Libya's oil is largely produced in the east, even though its legitimate government is in the west, and thus both sides were being paid from the same exported oil. Not only will the Dragut Field offer Tripolitania an independent fiscal base for the first time in its history, it also exists outside extant Libyan oil and gas law, as a project owned entirely by QatarEnergy, on which the GNU simply receives a 40% cut of all revenues above the $60/barrel cost of production (even at a conservative $80/barrel, the better part of a billion dollars annually from oil, and then, with natural gas revenues, around $2.5 billion--plus taxes associated with, say, Libyan laborers]. It also offers the Italians even more reason to back up the internationally recognized government, as it will control a vital source of their natural-gas, and the Americans are getting their cut too, with oilfield servicing contracts being offered to Halliburton, as QatarEnergy has no expertise working with shale, while Americans have it in spades--if anything there's too much American shale equipment on the market right now as their drillers hold their plays tight to their chest.