Azerbaijan, Baku, May 6 / Trend M. Moezzi /
A Russian company hired to conduct a five to six-month study of Iran's helium reserves in the South Pars oil and gas field still hasn't issued any conclusions two and a half years after taking on the project but that hasn't derailed Iran's hopes about extracting the gas.
Waiting for answers, Iranian scientists tried to conduct their own small studies. Those couldn't be finished because of a lack of scientific resources and experience.
Despite the absence of any definitive conclusion about how much helium Iran could produce from South Pars, the Managing Director of Iran's Pars Oil and Gas Company, Mousa Souri, said he has hopeful plans for helium production can be made when the study's finished this year, Pana news agency reported.
The South Pars gas and oil field, shared by Iran and its Persian Gulf neighbor Qatar, is said by Souri to have the world's biggest reserves of the gas, followed by Russia and the U.S.
Qatar extracts 25 million cubic meters (mcm) of helium annually, making it the fifth biggest producer of the gas in the world, and is working to more than double its production to 58 mcm, Souri said earlier.
Helium is extracted along with natural gas and is burned off in Iran's South Pars operations. Separating helium from natural gas is a complicated process that would be made even more difficult because Iran's existing South Pars refineries have different designs and can't be shut down over long periods of time for the overhaul they would need.
No accommodation has been made for helium production in Iran's new refinery designs either. That makes it unlikely for Iran to be able to distill and produce the inert gas in the near future.
The second most abundant element in the universe, helium, is found in natural gas reserves on earth. It has many applications ranging from being used in rocket fuel to detecting gas leaks. The biggest, and fastest growing, demand for helium comes from the medical industry which uses the element in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) equipment.
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