How easily the oil industry can piece itself together is unclear, however. Listening to Ali Tarhouni, the oil and finance minister for the rebels' National Transitional Council or NTC, it sounds simple enough. He told CNN last week that the six-month war appeared to have damaged only "about 10%" of the oil infrastructure, and said he was astonished to discover that Gaddafi's forces had not blown up or burnt key facilities - like the oil refinery at Zawiyah 30 miles west of Tripoli - as they faced a devastating defeat. Libya's oil production has plummeted since the revolt erupted in February to an all-time low last month of about 60,000 barrels a day. That's a trickle compared to the 1.6 million barrels a day last January. Tarhouni claims that gas pipelines will reopen almost immediately (good news for Italians, 25% of whose gas comes from Libya) while Libya could pump about 500,000 barrels a day of oil within four months, and return to prewar levels within a year. (See stunning photos of the battle for Tripoli.)

But the rebel leaders' estimates could be wildly optimistic - not surprisingly, given their wildly optimistic mood, after crushing a 42-year dictatorship in just six months. The reality for oil production, say analysts, might be a lot more sobering than Tarhouni suggests. "To get back to 1.6 million barrels a day will take about three years," says Ross Cassidy, North Africa oil researcher for Wood Mackenzie, a global energy consultancy based in Edinburgh, Scotland, which recently analyzed each Libyan oil field. The new Sahara fields in Libya's remote south-west could indeed start pumping quickly. But about two-thirds of the country's production comes from giant fields around the east-central Sirte Basin, and there, engineers could face major challenges, Cassidy says - even leaving aside the fact that armed Gaddafi loyalists are still holed up in the nearly Mediterranean city of Sirte. Since most of those fields have operated since the 1960s, oil needs to be pumped continually, in order to avoid pipelines being clogged up. "Some of them are decades old," he says. "In a six-month shut-in of these fields, the reservoir pressure can drop and oil facilities could get gummed up." Oil companies, including Italian, French, U.S. and Spanish majors, all scrambled to leave Libya shortly after the fighting began in February.

On paper, Libya's potential is huge - far exceeding what Gaddafi achieved. The country has nearly 44 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, and the oil industry has badly underperformed for many years. Libya produced about 3 million barrels a day in 1970 before Gaddafi launched his "people's revolution." That dropped to about half, as years of international sanctions drove out big U.S. companies, and ground many others down in slow, arcane bureaucracy. Recent exploration projects by big oil companies have proved disappointing. And there have been political headaches too. Even after Western companies returned to Libya in strength in 2004, Gaddafi frequently used his dealings with them as a way of pressuring his old enemies. As world oil prices rocketed, so Libya demanded ever-greater percentages of the profits - a major gripe among oil companies, which were forced to hand over 90% of revenues to Gaddafi's regime, compared with about a 70% government share elsewhere in the region. (See how the rebels are struggling to remake Libya from scratch.)

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