Baku, Azerbaijan, March 30
By Fatih Karimov - Trend:
Iran will allocate 18 percent of assets of the National Development Fund to implement oil and gas projects in the upstream sector, the Tasnim News Agency reported on March 30.
The money will be paid as a loan to investors of the private and cooperative sectors to implement upstream oil and gas projects.
The upstream sector includes the searching for potential underground or underwater crude oil and natural gas fields, drilling of exploratory wells, and subsequently drilling and operating the wells that recover and bring the crude oil and/or raw natural gas to the surface.
The NDF is Iran's sovereign wealth fund. It was founded in 2011 to replace the Oil Stabilization Fund.
The NDF forecasts its total assets increase by $17.5 billion in the current Iranian calendar year, which began on March 21, 2014.
Iran will deposit 31 percent of its oil income to the NDF in the current year. Based on Iran's Fifth Five-Year Development Plan, the NDF's input should be increased by three percent by 2015.
Deputy Oil Minister Emad Hosseini said on Jan. 14 that giant oil companies such as Shell and Total need to use the full capacity of Iran's domestic manufacturers in order to carry out projects in the country's oil and gas sector, the Mehr News Agency reported.
"Domestic manufacturers also need to boost the quality of their products in order to meet global standards" he explained.
"The cost of oil and gas projects has been increased by three to four times in the past few years," Hosseini said.
Iran has the world's fourth-largest proved national reserves of oil - most of it cheap to produce - and is home to the biggest proved reserves of natural gas, some 18 percent of the global total.