Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 24
By Umid Niayesh - Trend:
Iran's household gas consumption stood at 421 million cubic meters on Dec. 23 which is a new record, the Spokesman of National Iranian Gas Company (NIGC) Majid Boujarzadeh said.
Boujarzadeh said that despite the sharp rise in the gas consumption the NIGC continues to supply the household with natural gas without any problem across the country, Iran's Mehr news agency reported Dec. 24.
He called the citizens for rational gas consumption, saying if the consumers decrease the home air temperature by one Celsius, the country's total gas consumption will be reduced by 6 percent.
He said that Iran has supplied over 40 billion cubic meters of gas to power plants during the first nine months of current fiscal year (March 21-Dec. 21), which is 9 billion cubic meters more compared to the same period of the preceding year.
Iran averagely supplies over 82 million cubic meters of gas per day to power plants currently, Boujarzadeh said.
He added that the country's industrial units also consume about 80 million cubic meters of gas per day.
The Islamic Republic faced severe gas shortages last winter.
In addition to cutting the gas supply to power plants, which led to burning $30 billion of liquid fuels, the Iranian government had to decrease gas delivery to petrochemical plants from 1,236 million to 530 million cubic feet. That caused a drop in the petrochemical production by 7.5 million metric tons during the last fiscal year (ended on March 21).
It should be noted that the Islamic Republic holds 33.6 trillion cubic meters of proven gas reserves, sharing 18 percent of total global gas reserves which puts the country in the top of the world's gas holders list.
However, lack of proper technology and investment led to long-term delays in implementation of gas production projects.
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