By chance I recently came across some work I did over a decade ago as a student for a market research company. It was a research project about 'local content' in the oil & gas industries. I had very little memory of doing it & reading through I was really struck by something.
'Local content' in this context broadly means the development of local skills, technology transfers, and use of local manpower and local manufacturing within an oil or gas exporting country, & I had to research the local content environment in all of those countries.
What struck me was that the country with by far the most onerous (from the Western oil companies' perspective) local content regulations was Libya (pre-2011 of course).
I found notes I had taken from calls with oil company employees and other relevant industry people & many complained about the "impositions" put in place by Gaddafi and how Libya's local content regulations were too high. As this 2010 article states:
Within a couple of years of when that research was done, NATO had destroyed Libya and Gaddafi was gone, the country's local content regulations gone with him too I am sure.
I am not implying a simple mono-casual relationship between those things, but the line often trotted out about how Gaddafi had become the Western oil companies' best friend etc is clearly not true and I know that from personal experience, even if I had almost forgotten about it.
A 2010 report warned this about Libya's local content environment and what its government was likely to do, and a year later that government was gone, overthrown by NATO.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh