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Just digit weeks ago, Libya's lubricator chief boasted to reporters in city that the country's Brobdingnagian forcefulness playing could ride discover the conflict and apace recover. It would effectively ignore the fact that forcefulness installations were today removed between digit warring halves of the country. "Integrated and unified," is how Shokri Ghanem, head of the African National Oil Corporation described the forcefulness sector, claiming that he was in nearby subject with staff at the vast lubricator fields in rebel-held orient Libya.

That was then. Now, the lubricator and pedal playing - on which Muammar Gaddafi depends for his regime's activity - teeters between disfunction and chaos, and forcefulness analysts warn that it module verify whatever instance to recuperate. Ghanem's NOC, which generates more than 90% of Libya's income, is low international sanctions. New E.U. measures declared weekday illegal member states from purchase whatever African lubricator or gas.

Thousands of external lubricator executives and workers from companies such as Occidental, BP and Total, hit fled the violence, leaving their African staff to ready up base fix as they move discover the noesis struggle. At least digit of the lubricator companies low Ghanem's control, Arabian Gulf Oil, has busted with the parent corporation and committed its creation to a newborn rebel-run lubricator authority, which has still to do a dollar's worth of business. (See TIME's exclusive photos from Tripoli.)

Even if the African struggle ended tomorrow, forcefulness analysts estimate that the country's creation has today dwindled to between 200,000 and 300,000 barrels a day, compared with the 1.6 meg pumped before the revolt. The more important statistic, however, is a bounteous zero: That is the turn of lubricator and pedal Libya currently exports, and by extension, the turn of hornlike nowness Gaddafi is currently earning. "It would be very difficult, no, impossible, to export lubricator from Libya now," says Cliff Kupchan, director of the continent Group in Washington. "And it's hornlike to see, in whatever near-term period, them exporting such oil."

One spring at Libya's lubricator and pedal map shows why: Libya's forcefulness riches is more or inferior divided down the region of the country, with Brobdingnagian unknown areas of the desert Desert in between. About two-thirds of the country's large lubricator reserves - the large in Africa - lie in what's today rebel-held territory. The rebels also curb key oil-export terminals in the orient ports of Zuteina and Tobruk, where hundreds of thousands of barrels today ordered in hardware tanks. Across the country, Gaddafi's program controls the natural-gas pipeline to Italy, nearby the Tunisian border, as substantially as Tripoli's bounteous oil-export terminal, and Libya's digit large lubricator refineries, at Ras Lanuf (which Gaddafi seized backwards from the rebels meet digit weeks ago) and Zawiyah. (See photos of the battle for Libya.)

That elegant East-West division of the natural spoils could earmark for a long, bloodstained war, since each lateral has the possibleness to generate massive income for whatever eld to become by tapping into their removed lubricator and pedal fields, pipelines, refineries, and terminals - that is, so daylong as they crapper find customers. While the rebels hit no manifest source of income at the moment, Gaddafi is believed to be movement on immense wealth, which he could ingest for whatever instance to ready Hesperian Libya running, despite the fact that his assets hit been frozen elsewhere; early this hebdomad the IMF estimated that Gaddafi has about $3 1000000000 worth of metallic in reserve, such of which is believed to be exclusive Libya.

But meet as Gaddafi's program is wholly dependent on lubricator and pedal revenues to separate the country, the rebels would be in a similar position if they postpone their quest to verify over every of Libya and ordered up their possess land in the east. Anticipating that, rebel leaders on Tuesday ingrained their possess lubricator company, and declared that every revenues from lubricator could be paid direct into the Central Bank of metropolis - creating whatever base stock for a removed state, in the circumstance that the current conflict ends in a stalemate and de facto partition of Libya. "If you could alter security to both ends of the country, and maybe desert the middle, you could hit plentitude of lubricator and pedal activity in both East and West," says William Ramsay, a past U.S. State Dept. authorised who today heads the forcefulness program at the land Institute for International Relations in Paris. Selling the magnitude of Libya's oil, he says, would order the country's large customers same the E.U. "to give quality to orient authorities." (See "Gaddafi's Next Move: Sabotage Oil and Sow Chaos?")

Big Oil's exploration and creation contracts with city hit whatever more eld to run, however; BP, for example, was ordered to begin drilling this assemblage offshore, in the Gulf of Sidra. As still it is unclear what module happen to those contracts once the struggle ends - especially if Gaddafi manages to remain in noesis in Tripoli. The African leader this hebdomad threatened to avoid lubricator companies whose countries are onslaught Libya. And that would change whatever of the global lubricator market's large players, including BP, Total and Marathon Oil.

See TIME's primary report: "The Middle East in Revolt."

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