Drone Attacks Target Libyas Oil and Electricity Facilities

Oil and electricity facilities in Libya have been targeted in recent days by drones laden with explosives, causing massive fires, outages, and disruption to operations in the country. Nobody has yet claimed responsibility for the attacks.Libya’s state news agency LANA reported on Aug. 11 that the National Oil Corporation (NOC) confirmed that a diesel tank at the Zawiya oil complex was targeted on Tuesday evening by a drone equipped with explosives.“This marks the fifth such attack, resulting in the tank being breached and a fire breaking out,” it said.The fourth attack occurred in the early hours of Tuesday morning, targeting a diesel tank and sparking a fire.The NOC said fuel supplies were not affected.In an Aug. 11 post on Facebook, the NOC said that the Emergency and Safety Department was able to control all fires in the oilfield area.“The National Oil Corporation reassures citizens that all fires that broke out in several tanks in the oilfield area in Al-Zawiyah have been brought under control due to the targeting of them by suicide drones,” it said.The NOC said it could declare force majeure if drone attacks ‌on energy assets in the city ⁠continue.The drone attacks caused a tank containing about 1.2 million gallons of gasoline to collapse after a fire.A spokesperson for the tank’s owner, ​Brega Petroleum Marketing, which is in charge of Libya’s fuel supplies, had said earlier on Tuesday that the fires were expected to be extinguished by Wednesday.A drone strike also ignited a fire at a major electrical facility in Zawiya.The state-run General Electricity Company of Libya (GECOL) said that a power substation that links power plants to homes and businesses was completely burned down on Aug. 11, Libyan news site Libyaakhbar reported on Wednesday.After Tuesday’s attack on the power plant, U.S. company General Electric withdrew its teams from the facility “until security conditions and a suitable and safe work environment are ensured,” GECOL said. General Electric performs maintenance and upgrading services for the plant.​GECOL said that more than 700 megawatts of the ​plant’s total 1,300 MW of generation capacity is now unavailable.In the country’s east, in the city of Benghazi, a car bomb killed a senior military officer of a self-styled military force on Monday. No group has so far claimed responsibility for the bombing.Abdul-Hamid Dbeibah, the prime minister of one of Libya’s two rival governments, denounced the drone attacks on Wednesday as “a serious crime and an escalation that will not go unanswered.”“We will reach those responsible for this attack, and the accountability will be firm,” he said in a statement. “No one will be protected by their position, status, or influence.”According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA’s) country analysis on Libya, the Zawiya refinery on the western coast has a capacity of 120,000 barrels per day.At the beginning of 2024, Libya held Africa’s largest proved oil reserves, at 48 billion barrels, representing 41 percent of the continent’s total reserves.The country, which is on the Mediterranean, has been in conflict since a NATO-backed uprising-turned-civil war toppled and killed longtime dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton played a central role in the 2011 NATO military intervention. Upon learning of Gaddafi’s violent death in October 2011 on a news broadcast, Clinton famously joked on camera, “We came, we saw, he died.”According to a 2024 Small Arms Survey report, armed groups from Zawiya, a coastal city that lies 30 miles west of the capital, Tripoli, have come to play an increasingly important role in Libya’s power struggles.It said that “conflict among these groups has been endemic, but has generally been limited to intermittent clashes, rather than escalating into sustained, all-out confrontation.”The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.