Azerbaijan, Baku, Oct. 25 / Trend D.Khatinoglu/
An advisor to the European Union, Dr Mehrdad Emadi-Moghadam from Staffordshire University in England, said in an interview with Trend that Switzerland's Elektrizitaetsgesellschaft Laufenburg (EGL) is keen to buy Iranian gas without cooperating over construction of transition routes and offering technical helps to Iran.
Managing director of the National Iranian Gas Export Company (NIGEC), Hossein Bidarmaghz said on Tuesday that negotiation over selling Iran's gas to EGL is being kept and we are at final operational steps.
Swiss energy group EGL completed a 25-year deal with the National Iran Gas Export Company (NIGEC) to deliver 5.5 billion cubic meters of gas per year to Europe in 2007.
Iran is vital need of EGL's technical assistance to operate this gas contract, but EGL rejects any technical cooperation with Iran, Emadi-Moghadam told Trend on Tuesday.
"EGL does not hold any commitment to help Iran technically under the contract," he said.
EGL is one of the shareholders in Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) project, where it has 42.5% share.
TAP will transport gas from the Caspian region via Greece and Albania and across the Adriatic Sea to southern Italy and further into Western Europe. The project is aimed at enhancing security of supply as well as diversification of gas supplies for the European markets.
Last year TAP stated that the pipeline will not transport any Iranian gas under the current political circumstances. According to the statement, TAP pipeline is designed to cater for the volumes of gas from the second stage of Azerbaijani Shah Deniz gas field development that will be exported beyond Turkey into Europe. TAP shareholders consider Caspian gas to be the initial source of supply to fill TAP's initial capacity of 10 bcm per year.
Iran has a contract with Turkey to export 10 billion cubic meters of natural gas to the latter.
According to BP statistics, Iran exported 8.5 bcm of gas to Turkey in 2010 and imported 6.5 bcm of gas from Turkmenistan. Iran produced 138.5 bcm of gas in 2010 and its domestic gas consumption was 136.5 bcm. Iran currently has only two bcm surplus gas per year. Iran says its gas production will increase by 100 percent to 1.2 bcm per day until 2015, by launching all of South Pars's phases.
The South Pars gas field is shared by Iran and Qatar. The Iranian share, which is divided into 29 phases, has about 14 trillion cubic meters of gas, or about eight percent of the total world reserves, and more than 18 billion barrels of liquefied natural gas resources.
On the other hand, about 80 percent of Iran's oil reserves are in their second half-life and for maintaining the oil production level, it needs to inject at least 150 million cubic meters of gas per day to the oil wells.
However, Iran says that during the first half of the current solar year (started on March 21), some 110 million cubic meters of natural and soar gas (including 12 mcm of natural gas) was injected to oil fields in a day.
According to OPEC's annual report, Iran's oil production has decreased from 4.07 to 3.54 since 2006.
Emadi underlined that Iran would be able to export maximum one to five of the figure that was indicated in the contract with EGL.
A.Badalova contributed to the article