Latest Iranian Oil Ministry figures value of the country’s exported oil for the last year at $217 billion, and claims production is set to increase on the back of investments, according to the state-backed Mehr news agency.
The announcement follows reports that Iran’s oil production massively undershot government targets, and actually declined in 2010 from its 2009 level by an average of around 70,000 barrels per day (bpd).
The Oil Ministry is countering this news with details of $40 billion of planned investment in the oil & gas sector within the next year as part of a Five-Year Development Plan.
“By 2010, Iran produced on average 4.2 million barrels of oil, 600 million cubic meters of gas, and 400,000 barrels of gas condensates per day,” the Mehr News Agency quoted Iranian Deputy Oil Minister Mohsen Khojasteh-Mehr as saying.
Commenting on the details of investment plans in the upstream and downstream sectors of Iran’s oil industry during the Fifth Five-Year Development Plan (2011-2016), he stated that if the financing programs are completely implemented, Iran’s oil, gas, and condensate output will increase considerably by 2016, according to Mehr.
There remains skepticism within the industry over whether such ambitious improvements can be delivered.
So the daily output of oil will increase to 4.4 million barrels, the output of gas condensates will rise to 1.1 million barrels, and the natural gas output will rise to 1.47 billion cubic meters in the next five years, he added.
“Through the implementation of these plans, the value of Iran’s oil and gas production will rise from $217 billion in 2010 to $350 billion in 2015,” Khojasteh-Mehr told Mehr. The vast majority of this revenue increase will come from the developed exploitation of the South Pars gas field.
In 2011, Iran plans to invest $15.8 billion for the development of the untapped phases of the South Pars gas field, $4.5 billion for joint oil fields, $3.7 billion for domestic oil fields, and $6.5 billion for other domestic gas fields, he said.
