Libya’s National Oil Corporation announced five winning blocks on February 11, 2026, the results of the country’s first competitive licensing round in 17 years. By the middle of June, only three of those awards had converted into signed production-sharing agreements, the contracts that turn a winning bid into an operating legal framework. The other two took considerably longer. The gap between them says something specific about how predictable Libya’s contracting process actually is for a bidder deciding whether to compete in the round that follows.
What Signed in June
NOC Chairman Masoud Suleiman signed three production-sharing agreements at a ceremony in mid-June 2026, covering the three blocks Eni, QatarEnergy, Repsol, MOL and TPAO had won between them: Eni and QatarEnergy’s Offshore License O1, Repsol’s joint award of Offshore License O7 with MOL and TPAO, and Repsol’s second award, Onshore License C3, with TPAO. Executives from Repsol, Turkish Petroleum and MOL attended the ceremony in person alongside Suleiman. Roughly four months separated the February award and the June signature for all three. Suleiman said the agreements “reflect growing confidence in Libya’s oil and gas sector and will support the growth of exploration, development and production.”
What Didn’t
Chevron’s award, onshore Contract Area 106 in the Sirte Basin, followed a longer path. The company signed its production-sharing agreement on August 24, 2026, more than six months after its February 11 award and over two months after the other three blocks had already closed. Reporting on the deal described it as converting months of exploration talks into an operating legal framework, language that suggests genuine, extended negotiation rather than a simple paperwork lag. Aiteo’s award, the onshore M1 block in the Murzuq Basin, has an even less defined timeline. No signed production-sharing agreement for M1 had been publicly reported as of early September, nearly seven months after the award was announced. Aiteo is a Nigerian independent rather than a Western supermajor, and its M1 win in February marked one of the few instances of an African company, rather than an established international operator, securing acreage in the round. Whatever is holding that specific agreement back, it has not been resolved on the same schedule as the three blocks that closed in June.
A Useful Yardstick, From Chevron’s Own History
Chevron has done this before, and the company’s own record offers the cleanest comparison available. In 2005, Chevron was awarded onshore Block 177 under Libya’s EPSA IV bid round, and its production-sharing agreement with the NOC took effect on March 31 of that year, roughly ten weeks after the award. That earlier round used a sealed-bid structure with a fixed production-share formula, a simpler mechanism than the negotiated terms attached to the current PSA model. This time, the same company’s award-to-signature gap ran more than six months, over three times as long as its own 2005 precedent.
Chevron’s own gap doesn’t prove Libya’s current process is slower than its predecessor across the board. Three of five blocks closed within four months, a pace that compares reasonably well against Chevron’s own twenty-first century experience in the country. What it does show is that the process is not uniformly fast. A bidder’s own internal review requirements, and the scale and history of its return to Libya, appear to matter as much as anything happening on Libya’s side of the table. Chevron’s gap likely reflects the scrutiny a major US company applies before re-entering a market it exited sixteen years earlier, not a change in how quickly NOC itself can move. Repsol, by contrast, was already operating Libya’s largest producing field before the round even opened, and its two blocks moved through the same June signing ceremony as Eni’s without any reported delay.
Companies bidding in the next round should read the practical lesson closer to the three-block outcome than the two-block one: the institutional machinery capable of closing a deal in four months now exists, even if not every counterparty moves at the same speed once a block is theirs to close.
