Iranian Oil Ministry will not wait for result of Vienna talks, Owji says

Speaking on the sidelines of the signing ceremony of a memorandum of understanding on the construction of the Pars Petroleum Products Pipeline (Mehraran-Fasa-Shiraz in southern province of Fars), he noted that foreign funding has been used in some development projects in recent months, adding that details of the contracts will be published as needed, Shana reported.

The Pars Petroleum Products Pipeline with the total length of 445 kilometers will be built using the financial resources of the domestic Bank Tejarat.

“The project, like other projects that have been contracted in recent months, is supported by domestic resources; Today, banks can take partnership in oil industry projects rather than running businesses,” the minister said.

Owji noted that according to the plans, an oil industry contract will be signed every two to three weeks using domestic financial resources.

In recent months, the Parliament supported the Ministry of Oil for signing contracts to develop the country's oil and gas fields, the minister pointed out.

Within the last six months, the Ministry of Oil has signed $4.5 billion worth of contracts for the development of oil and gas fields using domestic and foreign resources, he concluded.

On Thursday, the Iranian Oil Ministry awarded over half a billion-dollar worth of flare gas projects to domestic companies as part of efforts to reach a ‘zero flares’ target by 2025.

The contracts will be worth €470 million ($520 million) and will reduce the gas flared from the Iranian oilfields by 600 million cubic feet (nearly 17 million cubic meters) by 2024.

The eight contracts are part of an investment package worth $1.22 billion introduced by the Iranian government in 2018 to recover flare gas from oilfields in southwestern Iran.

The government had already awarded $288 million of the projects to local contractors, according to officials in the Bid Boland Refinery, a facility especially designed to process the recovered flare gas for use in petrochemicals or industrial plants in the region.

Owji, who supervised the signing of the contracts, vowed that Iran will reach a zero-flare target by the end of the current administrative government in 2025.

Owji estimated that around 40 million cubic meters (1.4 billion cubic feet) per day of natural gas is currently flared or vented in oilfields in Iran.

Source: Iran Daily