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Eni's output of oil and gas in Libya has reached 200,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day with all its fields resuming operations and a return to pre-war levels seen by the end of next June, top executives of the Italian firm said.

“We are now at about 200,000 barrels per day. Within a few weeks we have managed to almost return to pre-crisis levels,” Eni Chief Executive Paolo Scaroni told reporters at an oil and gas seminar.

“We have resumed our activities (in Libya) in a very satisfactory way which is above our most optimistic expectations. Libya for us is back to being business as usual,” Scaroni said later on the margins of an exhibition opening.

Eni top executives will meet Libya's newly formed government in the next few weeks, he said.

Scaroni brushed off media talk that Libya's new oil minister, Abdulrahman Ben Yazza, as former head of a joint venture between Eni and Libya's National Oil Corporation (NOC), would be close to the Italians.

“When one becomes a minister, one works for his own country and forgets all that has been before,” he said.

Eni, which has operated in Libya since 1959 and is the biggest foreign operator in the oil-rich north African country, has oil production contracts there which are in force until 2042 and gas contracts in force until 2047.

Claudio Descalzi, Eni's head of exploration and production, told the seminar that all of Eni's oil and gas fields in Libya have restarted operations suspended earlier this year after the start of civil war.

The offshore Bouri field, operated by Eni with a 50 percent stake, was the latest to restart output.

Eni aims to return to pre-war levels of about 280,000 boepd in Libya by the end of June 2012 and increase output to an average of 300,000 boepd in 2013, Descalzi said.

It hopes to be able to double its current output within 10 years by 2021 with an investment of $30-35 billion, he said.

Before the February uprising, Libya was pumping around 1.6 million bpd of oil, of which 1.3 million flowed onto the international markets, but the war caused a virtual halt in output.

Gas flows from Libya to Italy via Greenstream pipeline, suspended in February and resumed in October, have reached 15-18 million cubic metres (mcm) a day and are expected to reach 30-31 mcm a day in the future, Descalzi said.

HUGE DISCOVERY IN MOZAMBIQUE

Eni, which in October made a giant gas discovery offshore Mozambique and is yet to drill 12-13 exploration wells, expects its total reserves to reach 1 trillion cubic metres, Descalzi said.

“Our idea is that we can have production in 2018 and have first cargoes of LNG (sent) towards China, India, Japan,” he said.

Eni plans to build a liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal in Mozambique with a capacity of 30 million tonnes a year.

Eni, the biggest foreign oil and gas operator in Africa, produces more than 50 percent of its total output at the continent and expects Africa to remain the main driver of its output growth in the future, Descalzi said. - Reuters