Analysis

• 2026-04-19Analysis

  Oil Has Twenty Years Tops': The IMF Line That Reframed Libya's Energy Transition

  Late 2023, an IMF economist dropped a line in a Libya meeting I was in: 'oil has twenty years tops.' Now Libya is hitting decade-high crude production while the Iran war has closed the Strait of Hormuz, broken the Gulf refineries that supplied Libya's refined imports, and exposed the Haftar-Russian smuggling nexus that was quietly moving sanctioned fuel through Libya's southern borders into Sudan. The solar pivot the IMF line was pointing at now has to happen inside that wreckage.