A senior Iranian oil and gas executive has said that the country plans to significantly increase gas production from its South Pars gas field.
The Pars Oil and Gas Company’s Managing Director Ali Akbar Shabanpour says gas extraction will be increased by 100mn cubic metres (mcm) daily through completing drilling operations in the offshore segments of Phases 12, 15, 16, 17 and 18, as well as parts of Phases 19, 20 and 21.
Speaking at an offshore pipe laying ceremony for South Pars Phases 20 and 21 last week, Shabanpour stated that the gas refining capacity at the prioritised phases will reach 200mn cubic metres at the end of the current fiscal year.
Commending Iran’s oil sector workers, Shabanpour said that out of the 4,000km of offshore pipe-laying, so far only 700km has been done by “foreigners”.
Iran’s Oil Minister Bijan Zangeneh had recently said that the country’s natural gas production capacity will climb to 1bn cubic meters (bcm) per day in four years’ time.
He said his ministry’s first programme is to increase crude oil and gas condensate production capacity. To that effect, the natural gas export will amount to 80bn cubic meters by March 2022.
The minister claimed that by completion of all phases of Iran’s South Pars gas field, it will produce 650,000 barrels of gas condensates, 6.7mn tonnes of liquid petroleum gas (LPG) and 4mn tonnes of ethane per day.
Iran shares the South Pars – the world’s largest gas field, located in the Arabian Gulf – with Qatar, where it is known as the North Dome. According to the International Energy Agency, the field holds an estimated 51tn cubic metres of natural gas and some 50 billion barrels of natural gas condensates.