The joint oil and gas fields had until a few years ago been a big concern for the Iranian officials and even a large number of the Iranians.
Due to the past decades’ anti-Iran sanctions, these huge energy resorts that are located near the southern and western Iranian borders were either left unused or functioning at a very low production capacity than expected.
This had led to encouraging of Iran’s neighboring countries to take maximum advantage of their joint oil and gas fields with Iran.
Ever since President Hassan Rouhani took charge of the Petroleum Ministry to make tremendous efforts to block the path for making more losses on Iran’s joint oil and gas fields with its neighbors.
The norm for use of such fields in the world is taking equal shares of them by all sides, but the situation for Iran was quite unjust.
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Iran has a number of shared oil and gas fields with Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and Turkmenistan. The largest of them is located on the west side of Iran’s border river with Iraq, the Karun River, as well as the South Pars oil and gas field.
Iran and Iraq have lots of shared oil fields, but in terms of extracting from them, they have not pursued reciprocal cooperation or a harmonized joint policy.
Of course, until recent years, many of Iran’s joint oil and gas fields were commissioned to foreign contractors, whose projects were generally not completed due to sanctions.
For instance, in 2014 about 200 oil rigs were scheduled to be dug in Phase One of Azadegan Oil Field but on the pretext of the sanctions, only seven of them reached the production phase, according to reports.
Parallel with increased instability in Iraq which led the country to invite a number of large multi-national companies to develop those fields, Iraq’s oil extraction from those fields made a heavy loss on Iran.
Therefore, a comprehensive project on full development and use of those oil fields were devised and soon implemented.
The joint South Azadegan Oil field located in the Iran-Iraq border is 80 km of the southeast of the southwestern Iranian city of Ahvaz in Khuzestan province.
The estimated volume of the extractable oil resource in Azadegan Oil Field is around 605 billion barrels, which even based on the current $40 per barrel, amounts to a huge sum, indicates the great economic significance of that joint field.
Iran was extracting only 70,000 barrels per day (bpd) which was drastically less than Iraq’s extraction from that field; therefore, boosting Iran’s extraction from Azadegan Oil Field became of urgent propriety for the Iranian officials.
* Iran’s extraction exceeds Qatar’s in South Pars Field
The other most important field in the focus of attention of the Iranian government is the South Pars Oil Field- a joint field with Qatar.
This is the largest proved gas field in the world, with 14bn cubic meters of natural gas.
Until the year 2013, Iran had only 110 oil rigs in that field, while Qatar had over 400.
From then up to 2017, very special attention was paid to development and extraction from that field.
And this attention led to efforts to extract 570 million cubic meters each day in 2017 that left Qatar with its 560 million cubic meters' extraction behind.
It should be noted that Qatar had been extracting the same volume for eight years till that date.
Making the development of the South Pars and achieving success in that region became possible thanks to the completion of phases 17 to 21 of that macroscale project in the year 2017.
Up to that year, the completion of other phases of that gas field had enabled Iran to extract 610 million cubic meters of gas per day.
1424
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