Azerbaijan, Baku, Nov. 14 /Trend, A.Badalova/
Analysts at the major U.S. investment bank JP Morgan forecasts the Libyan oil production to rise to 1.2 million barrels per day by late 2012.
"Growth in 2012 remains a more open question, and we retain our cautious assumption that recovery will be much slower, rising to 1.2 mbd by the end of next year," the bank's monthly oil outlook reads.
Last week Libya's Acting Oil Minister Ali Tarhouni said a great progress was made in resuscitating the country's oil fields and that oil production level would return to more than 40 percent of its prewar level by late 2011. He said the Libyan oil production could reach 700,000 barrels per day by late 2011.
According to the International Energy Agency's (IEA) forecasts, Libya will produce around 1.17 million barrels per day by late 2012.
Before the Libyan crisis, the country produced 1.6 million barrels per day and 1.3 million barrels of these volumes were exported.
"Libya's oil production has continued to increase faster than we have anticipated. While we had expected an initial surge in production that would see the easy-to-restore fields restart, the scale and speed of the ramp-up has outstripped our forecasts," the analysts say.
In early November, the analysts revised up their forecasts on Libya's oil production for October through to December by an average 120,000 barrels per day to 520,000 barrels per day.
Moreover, the analysts believe that the recent start-up of production at the Elephant field will push Libya closer towards their December estimate of 700,000 barrels per day.
Last week, a giant oil field in west of Libya partly owned by Italian Eni SpA was reportedly restarted production.
Elephant is the largest field where the Italian Eni has a stake in country. The field produced nearly 126,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day in 2010.