Libya's National Oil Corporation (NOC) has put losses from the shutdown of the Sharara pipeline at more than $75 million, according to a statement reported by The Libya Observer.

The figure is the sharpest quantification yet of the economic damage from the latest interruption on the pipeline that carries crude from the 300,000-bpd-capacity Sharara field in Libya's southwest Murzuq Basin toward the Zawia terminal and refinery on the Mediterranean coast. NOC did not break the $75 million figure down by line item in the reporting available.

What does the loss figure cover?

NOC's estimate exceeds $75 million in losses tied directly to the pipeline shutdown. The reported figure follows the corporation's practice of tallying forgone revenue from halted production and export volumes when infrastructure feeding coastal terminals goes offline.

What the statement establishes:

• The Sharara pipeline has been shut in, halting flows from Libya's single largest producing field complex.
• NOC calculates the financial damage so far at more than $75 million.
• The loss estimate comes from the corporation itself, not from independent auditors or outside analysts.

What the statement does not resolve:

• A specific restart date for the line.
• The exact production volume lost per day during the outage.
• Whether NOC has declared, or will declare, force majeure on Sharara cargoes.

Why Sharara matters to the balance sheet

Sharara sits at the centre of Libya's upstream economics. The field's crude moves north through the pipeline to Zawia, where it feeds both export loadings and refinery runs on the coast. Any halt on that single artery therefore removes production, export capacity and refinery feedstock at once — a triple exposure that explains how losses climb past $75 million within a short shutdown window.

The company source matters here. NOC, as the state operator and concession holder through its subsidiaries and partner arrangements, is the only entity positioned to aggregate lost-barrel revenue across the value chain. Its $75-million-plus figure should be read as the operator's own accounting of the outage's cost.

How does this fit the pattern?

Sharara has a long history of output stoppages driven by events outside the technical domain — blockades, protests and interference with pipeline operations have repeatedly forced NOC to shut the field and downstream infrastructure. Each such episode has ended with the same sequence: a halt on the line, an accumulating loss estimate from NOC, and a negotiated resumption.

Analysts covering Libyan supply treat these outages as a recurring swing factor in OPEC production balances rather than isolated incidents. The North African producer's output is effectively capped not by reservoir performance but by the frequency and duration of these disruptions, and Sharara is the largest single point of failure in that equation.

The watch item

The number to track now is the restart date. Until flows resume on the Sharara–Zawia line, the loss figure NOC has already set above $75 million will keep rising, and Libya's headline production will remain below the level the field's capacity would otherwise support. Watch for NOC's next statement on force majeure status and any revised loss tally as negotiations over the pipeline's reopening proceed.