Baku, Azerbaijan, March 13
By Khalid Kazimov - Trend:
Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh has said that the country plans to export at least 20 million metric tons of oil products in the next Iranian fiscal year (starting March 21).
He said that increasing oil products export is highly important to the Oil Ministry because it will cover the funds needed for some of the ministry's projects, including those related to the South Pars field, ISNA reported March 13.
According to the official statistics, Iran's petroleum exports and bunkering increased significantly during the current year.
On the other hand, Iran bunkered over 3.1 million metric tons of fuel to ships sailing through the Gulf in the first ten months of the current Iranian calendar year, which indicates a 30-percent increase year on year.
Zanganeh also said that plans to divest the National Iranian Oil Refining and Distribution Company (NIORDC) are called off.
He added that a lot of changes are planned for the distribution of fuel.
As gas distribution to cities, villages, industries, power plants, etc increases, the NIORDC's tasks will also change, he said.
Zanganeh went on to say that the distribution of kerosene, liquid gas, and fuel oil will gradually diminish to zero.
NIORDC's duty in distributing gas oil and gasoline to the air transportation system will also decline, according to the new plans. He added that the liquid fuel distributed to power plants will gradually be replaced with gas.
A recent report said that the country's refineries consumed 1.859 million barrels of oil per day during last year, indicates 58,000 barrels increase on year.
In the current Iranian year (March 21, 2014 to March 20, 2015) 30 percent of the fuel sent to power plants was liquid, and the proportion will reach 12 to 10 percent in the following year, according to the oil minister.
Iran's actual primary energy consumption rose significantly, despite dropping liquid fuels consumption, according to a March 3 NIORDC report covering the last fiscal year's energy statistics.
The report says that the consumption level of all kind of primary energy carriers increased, with the exception of kerosene and fuel oil.
The overall actual energy consumption during the mentioned period reached 1,546 million barrels of oil equivalent (OE).