Baku, Azerbaijan, June 24
By Fatih Karimov - Trend: Iran hopes to find new oil and gas reserves in western and northeastern areas.
Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh said exploration operations in Golestan, Khorasan, and Kermanshah provinces are underway, Iran's Shana news agency reported on June 24.
It is hoped that new oil and gas reserves would be discovered in these areas, he added.
Iran's oil output could reach 4.0 million barrels per day in "less than three months" if Western sanctions are lifted over its nuclear energy program, Zanganeh said earlier this month.
"After lifting the sanctions, (in) less than three months we can produce four million barrels of oil per day", Zanganeh told reporters upon his arrival in Vienna on the eve of an OPEC output meeting.
That compares with Iran's current production of approximately 2.7 million bpd, according to OPEC data which cites secondary sources.
Iran still holds the world's largest proven natural gas reserves, at 33.8 trillion cubic meters-or 18.2 percent of the world's total proven reserves-according to a BP report published earlier this week, up from 33.6 trillion cubic meters at the end of 2012, when it overtook Russia.
The UK oil and gas giant's "Statistical Review of World Energy" also showed that despite holding the world's largest reserves, Iran only accounted for 0.5 percent of global natural gas production, at 166.6 billion cubic meters in 2013.