Libya’s National Oil Corporation offered 22 blocks in its first licensing round in 17 years, split evenly between onshore and offshore acreage. Only five went to winning bidders, and the round wasn’t a simple list of names attached to acreage. Each award came with its own basin, its own fiscal terms, and its own technical rationale. Here is what each one actually is.
Chevron’s Return: Onshore Contract Area 106, Sirte Basin
Chevron was designated the winning bidder for Contract Area 106an onshore block in the Sirte Basin covering 7,437 square kilometers. Kevin McLachlan, the company’s vice president of exploration, said the award “underscores our focus on North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean region, and is a good fit in our exploration strategy to grow our portfolio with high-quality acreage and high impact prospects.” The award followed a memorandum of understanding Chevron signed with the NOC in January 2026 to evaluate opportunities in the country, and it marks the company’s first Libyan acreage since it exited in 2010.
Eni and QatarEnergy’s Offshore Anchor: Block O1, Sirte Basin
Eni will operate Offshore License O1 with QatarEnergy as its 40 percent partner, covering roughly 29,000 square kilometers in the Sirte Basin’s offshore extension. Eni called the block part of “the offshore extension of the prolific Sirte Oil & Gas Province.” The company pointed to wide areas still lacking 3D seismic coverage that could hold additional hydrocarbon accumulations, alongside existing indications of stranded oil and gas discoveries. The pair committed to 2D and 3D seismic surveys and drilling over an initial five-year exploration period. Eni already operates roughly 162,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day in Libya. That makes it the country’s largest foreign producer heading into the round.
Repsol’s Two-Block Bet: Offshore O7 and Onshore C3
Repsol came away with the most acreage of any single bidder. It won two separate blocks. Offshore License O7 covers more than 10,300 square kilometers in water depths exceeding 1,500 meters, roughly 140 kilometers northwest of Benghazi. The same reporting on the round put Repsol’s stake in O7 at 40 percent, alongside Turkey’s TPAO at 40 percent and Hungary’s MOL at 20 percent. On Onshore License C3, which spans 8,200 square kilometers in the Sirte Basin, Repsol holds 60 percent and TPAO the remaining 40. Repsol already runs Libya’s largest producing field, the 300,000 barrel-a-day Sharara project. Neither of its new blocks required the company to build an operational base from scratch.
Aiteo’s Solo Entry: Onshore M1, Murzuq Basin
Nigeria’s Aiteo secured the onshore M1 block alone, in a section of the Murzuq Basin the same reporting placed near Libya’s borders with Niger and Algeria. The award represents a rare instance of an African independent, rather than a Western major or a state-backed regional player, winning acreage in a round otherwise dominated by companies like Chevron, Eni and Repsol. Aiteo is Africa’s largest privately owned energy company, and the M1 award gives it a foothold in a Libyan basin where Western majors have historically concentrated their own bids.
What the Fiscal Terms Changed
All five awards were made under a revised production-sharing model built to replace the terms Libya used in its last round, in 2007. According to figures the same reporting attributed to the NOC, the new terms could raise a contractor’s internal rate of return to as much as 35.8 percent, compared with roughly 2.5 percent under the old model. That is not a marginal adjustment. A contractor weighing whether to bid on unexplored Libyan acreage in 2025 was looking at return potential more than fourteen times higher than what the previous generation of contracts offered. That fiscal shift is the mechanical reason the round attracted more than 40 bids across its 22 blocks even though only five were ultimately awarded. It is also the backdrop for why the institutional track record behind these awards mattered as much as the blocks themselves: the terms explain why companies were willing to bid, but the awards only became real once Libya’s institutions proved they could carry a contract from announcement to signature. Not every block moved at the same pace once the paperwork started.
