Zawiya Refinery
building in Africa

The Zawia or Zawiya Refinery is an oil refinery located in Zawiya, Libya, which is about 40 kilometres (25 mi) west of Tripoli.
The refinery was opened in 1974 and it currently produces an estimated 120,000 barrels (19,000 m3) of oil products per day (bpd). It is a topping and reforming refinery having a distillation capacity of 6,000 tonnes per annum. The refinery is operated by the Zawia Oil Refining Company, a subsidiary of the National Oil Corporation. NOC is expected to re-tender an engineering, procurement and construction contract for upgrading the Zawia refinery.
Refinery Expansion and Rehabilitation 2006
This project is aimed at increasing the capacity of the refinery from 120,000 bbl/d (19,000 m3/d) by 24 percent, which will involve the installation of a new continuous catalytic reformer (CCR) unit, naphtha and gas-oil hydrotreaters and an isomerisation unit, as well as the installation of pneumatic control units and a supervisory control & data acquisition (SCADA) system. The project is being financed by the Libyan government.
“Zawiya Refinery” enters the record as building in Africa. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Zawiya, Refinery and building can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Zawiya Refinery” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Zawiya, Refinery and building provides the most credible route into that argument.
The strongest evidence will usually combine a dated visual record with documents produced by the authority responsible for the place. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 19, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q4116875. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1974 and 2006.
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This entry incorporates text from “Zawiya Refinery” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.