A senior Iranian official has estimated that the Islamic Republic will attract €10bn ($11bn) of new investments for its central oilfields, rejecting the notion of low oil prices halting finances in the energy industry.
“According to estimates, about €10bn of investment potentials are available for oil and gas projects in Iran’s central fields,” Salbali Karimi, directing manager of Iran’s Central Oil Fields Company (ICOFC), told the official Mehr News Agency.
An average of 100,000 barrels of oil per day (bpd) is currently being produced in the central oilfields of Iran.
“Daily crude production in the region is scheduled to climb in two stages before reaching a total of 190,000 to 200,000 barrels,” Karimi said.
Karimi mentioned that Iran’s goal has been to increase oil production to 350,000 bpd.
“In order to achieve the target of increased production during the post-sanctions era, implementation of development projects like increasing recovery factor via EOR and IOR have also been put on the agenda,” he revealed.
Asserting that recoverable crude oil reserves in Iran’s central regions add up to a total of 10bn barrels, the official said, “Moreover, a sum of 7tn cubic metres of recoverable natural gas reserves are deemed to be found in the area.”
He pointed to signs of increasing natural gas reserves in central oilfields of Iran given the discovery of new hydrocarbon fields and formations adding ‘due to the need for management of financial resources and costs, the number of active drilling rigs will decrease from 22 to 12 in the current year’.
In response to a question on decline of investment in Iran’s oil industry coinciding with dropping oil prices, Karimi commented ‘as a rule, when oil prices fall, the costs of services and investment need to go down in turn’.
“The issue of justification is not at stake in the field of energy since it is considered as a necessity. Energy cannot be excluded from everyday life and the level of unavoidability goes back to the systems and structures,” he explained.
“Low prices have brought about the best opportunity for investment in Iran’s oil and gas industry,” he added.
The official stressed that the costs of crude and natural gas production in Iran are much lower when compared with most Middle Eastern or OPEC countries.
“The National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) is not in favour of lower oil prices, but the fall in prices would lead to attraction of foreign investors to the country because of really low costs of production in Iran.”
