Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr.6
By Fatih Karimov - Trend:
Iran has reduced the budget which is allocated to the development of the South Pars gas field by 70 per cent in the past Iranian calendar year 1392, which ended on March 20, compared to its preceding year, the Tasnim News Agency reported on April 6.
Last year, $2.3 billion was allocated to the South Pars gas field development plan, which was the lowest for the past eight years.
In years 1385 and 1386, the South Pars budget was $2.8 billion and $3.2 billion, respectively.
This is while it had been approved to allocate $22 billion to the South Pars in the past year, but just $2.3 billion was actually paid. The budget which is required to develop the five prioritized phases of the gas field in the current year, namely the phases 12, 15, 16, 17, and 18, is about $9 billion.
Iran's Pars Oil and Gas Company will issue 20 trillion rials (about $800 million) worth of bonds in the next Iranian calendar year, which begins on March 21, to fund development projects in the South Pars gas field, IRIB reported on Monday.
South Pars is part of a wider gas field that is shared with Qatar. The larger field covers an area of 9,700 square kilometers, 3,700 square kilometers of which are in Iran's territorial waters (South Pars) in the Persian Gulf. The remaining 6,000 square kilometers, referred to as the North Dome, are in Qatar's territorial waters.
The Iranian gas field contains 14 trillion cubic meters of natural gas, about 8 percent of the world's reserves, and more than 18 billion barrels of LNG resources.
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.
Iran forecasts a big jump in its natural gas exports in the Iranian year 1394 (March 2015-March 2016), the Iranian deputy oil minister for planning affairs said on January 19.