Libya will offer new production-sharing agreements to international oil companies on improved terms to existing contracts, but this won’t happen this year, said the country’s Minister of Oil and Gas, Abdurahman Benyezza Wednesday.

Libya isn’t currently planning to revise the terms of existing contracts with foreign oil companies, but there may be a process to equalize the terms of new and existing contracts in the future, he said.

“At the moment we are working on the [contract] models. We’ll have to study and see where we can improve,” Mr. Benyezza told reporters at the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries International Seminar in Vienna. “Production-sharing agreements will be the main type of contracts of course. New ones will not be [offered] this year.”

Whether existing contract holders will also be offered the same terms as newcomers has yet to be decided, he said.

“We are not in a process to change [existing] agreements at this time,” he said. But in the future existing terms will be evaluated, “not to create inequality of contracts,” he added.

Libya intends to invest $10 billion on raising oil and gas production capacity from existing fields and $20 billion on new exploration in the next decade, Mr. Benyezza said.

Source: Dow Jones & Rigzone