Oil price is finding support as the news came out that a key oil terminal in Libya is closed over protests. While Libya is relatively a small producer within the OPEC and currently exempted from the OPEC production cut agreement, the country’s oil production has been making headlines as it rose by almost half a million barrels per day this year. With violence and civil war subsiding in Libya, the country is rapidly making up for the lost exports.

The Zueitina oil terminal in Libya has ceased loading cargos as port workers protest, demanding better working conditions, Bloomberg quoted the head of the workers’ union Merhi Abridan as saying. This means that oil coming from the fields around Zueitina will be stored at the port for the duration of the protest, and a spike in exports will likely follow. Zueitina is managed by a joint venture between the National Oil Corporation, Occidental Petroleum, and Austria’s OMV. The port exports an average of six 600,000 to 630,000-barrel cargoes a month, Abridan told Bloomberg. The workers at the port are demanding to be paid 20 months’ worth of delayed salaries, as well as health insurance, annual leave, payments for overtime work, and more time for maintenance work.

While it means that exports would resume sooner or later with a spike and with little impact on oil price but a prolonged protest or complete submission to workers’ demands could slow down the recovery in production and exports.