Libya’s second licensing round is expected to open late in 2026 or early 2027, under an updated EPSA-V framework that will extend bidding into the Pelagian basin alongside the Sirte, Murzuq and Ghadames basins covered in the first round. Planning for that Libya upstream push toward 2027 is already visible: the NOC is preparing to launch a dedicated Upstream Hub at January’s Libya Energy and Economic Summit in Tripoli. Libya oil production in 2026 is running close to 1.4 million barrels a day, the highest level in a decade, and the stated goal for year’s end is 1.6 million barrels a day, with 2 million the longer-term target.
Libya’s 2026 goal only makes sense against what the first round actually delivered. Libya’s National Oil Corporation announced the results of its first licensing round in 17 years on February 11, 2026. Five of twenty blocks on offer went to winning bidders. Chevron and Nigeria’s Aiteo each won individually, and three consortiums split the remaining awards: Repsol with BP, Eni North Africa with QatarEnergy, and Repsol with Hungary’s MOL Group and Turkiye Petrolleri. By June, most of those awards had converted into signed production-sharing agreements. Chevron’s own agreement, covering the 7,437-square-kilometer Area 106 in the Sirte Basin, followed more recently and turned months of talks into an operating legal framework.
The Turnaround Behind the Numbers
Farhat Bengdara chaired the National Oil Corporation from July 2022 until January 2025, and the production growth in that window is the reason major companies were willing to bid on Libyan blocks at all after a 17-year freeze. He inherited an NOC producing 660,000 barrels a day. By the time he left, production had climbed past 1.4 million. He said: “The strategy was to increase oil production, increase gas production, develop the infrastructure which is need major investment and attract international companies to invest in Libya.”
Kearney, the consultancy brought in to help develop the strategy, built it around four pillars running at once. The first was capability: building the NOC into an institution that could operate by international standards rather than as a wartime holding company. The second was environmental performance, formalized through an initiative NOC announced at COP28 in Dubai. The third was gas, backed by a dedicated strategy developed with Ernst & Young. The fourth was corporate governance, where Deloitte was brought in to improve transparency inside an organization that international majors would eventually need to trust with exploration rights worth billions of dollars. Each pillar depended on the others holding. A capability build without a credible gas strategy, or a governance overhaul without environmental commitments a partner like Eni could point to internally, would have left gaps a due-diligence team could find.
What the Second Round Needs to Replicate
None of the four pillars were only about oil in the ground. Libya holds Africa’s largest proven reserves, and that geology never went anywhere during the 17-year freeze. What changed between 2022 and 2026 was whether an international operator could look at the NOC and believe the institution running a licensing process, collecting production data, and enforcing contract terms was one it could work with for the next two to three decades. February’s five awards and the production-sharing agreements that followed are the direct evidence that belief now exists among at least some of the world’s largest operators.
Reaching 2 million barrels a day will require roughly $40 billion in new investment, the NOC’s own figure for what Libya investment at that scale actually costs, and it isn’t a number geology alone can raise. That kind of capital only moves when international companies trust the institution asking for it. Libya’s EPSA-V second round will test whether the same institutional discipline, the same four pillars applied to a wider set of basins and a longer list of bidders, can be sustained past the leadership transition at the National Oil Corporation Farhat Bengdara rebuilt. The first round proved international operators would return once the institution gave them a reason to. The second round is where Libya finds out whether that reason holds without him running the process.
