A fire at a crude storage tank in Ras Lanuf, the site of Libya's largest oil refinery and a petroleum port, may force Libya to reduce output by as much as 100,000 barrels a day.

The storage tank that caught fire yesterday during maintenance contains 500,000 barrels of crude oil, mostly from fields developed by Petro-Canada, Shokri Ghanem, the chairman of Libya's National Oil Corp., said in a telephone interview from Tripoli today.

``The fire is still raging for a second day, we're trying to prevent it from spreading to the whole tank farm,'' he said. ``We have to reduce production by 70,000 barrels a day to 100,000 barrels a day.''

Libya, a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, produced 1.69 million barrels a day last month, according to Bloomberg estimates.

The country was already producing below its full capacity of 1.85 million barrels a day before the fire. A drilling accident in an offshore field has removed 75,000 barrels of daily production since May, while maintenance at two onshore fields has reduced output by 100,000 barrels a day since July.

Maintenance at a pipeline for associated gas that links the Waha and Defa oil fields, in central Libya, will take another month, said Ghanem. Efforts to repair damage at a well in Total SA's al-Jurf offshore field will take longer, he said.

[.bloomberg.com]