Baku, Azerbaijan, May 5
By Fatih Karimov - Trend: Iran will start exporting natural gas to Iraq in the current Iranian calendar year, which ends in March 2015.
Iranian Deputy Oil Minister Ali Majedi said the pipeline which will carry Iranian gas to Iraq is being built, Iran's ISNA news agency reported on May 5.
He said that the trilateral agreement between Iran, Iraq, and Syria intended to export Iranian gas to Europe has been scrapped due to political unrest in Syria.
This is while Iranian Deputy Oil Minister Hamidreza Araqi said on March 4 that based on an agreement with Iraq, Tehran will start exporting gas to Baghdad this summer, Iran's Mehr News Agency reported.
Prior to that, it had been announced that Iran will start exporting gas to Iraq in the spring.
"Iran will start exporting limited amounts of gas to Iraq at three or four million cubic meters per day," Araqi said.
He went on to note that Iran will implement the deal in three phases.
"Transition to the second phase will take some time because 300 kilometers of pipeline need to be laid," he explained.
The Iranian Fars News Agency reported in February that once the pipeline is ready, Tehran will start exporting seven million cubic meters of gas per day to Baghdad.
The figure will reach 40 million cubic meters in the first phases. This is while Iran was supposed to export only 25 million cubic meters of gas per day to its south-western neighbor in the first phase.
Iranian gas is expected to account for 30-35 percent and 65-70 percent of Iraqi households and power plants gas consumption, respectively.