Azerbaijan, Baku, Jul.15/ Trend F.Milad/
The West Ethylene Pipeline project is almost 99 percent complete and its first section will soon be inaugurated, the National Petrochemical Company (NPC) managing director announced on Sunday.
Abdolhossein Bayat added that the first section of the pipeline, extending from Assalouyeh in the south to Kermanshah in the west, will be commissioned within the next few weeks, the Mehr News Agency reported.
The second section of the pipeline will be inaugurated by 2013, he said, adding that the pipeline's total length will be 2700 kilometers.
Once the pipeline becomes operational, it will feed 13 petrochemical complexes, Nader Qorbani, an official with the NPC said on June 4.
The West Ethylene Pipeline includes 8 pressure boosting stations and it will transfer ethylene from the Pars Special Economic Energy Zone situated in Assalouyeh to petrochemical complexes in western provinces of Iran.
The pipeline project has a capacity of 2.5 million tons per annum and will reduce the current concentration of petrochemical industries from Iran's southern provinces to the country's western region, another NPC official, Ahmad Reza Heidarnia, said on May 28.
The inauguration of new pipeline project, and the setting up of 11 petrochemical complexes along the pipeline, would boost Iran's petrochemical capacity by 3.5 million tons per annum.
In the last Iranian calendar year that ended on March 19, 2012, the country exported $14.2 billion worth of polymer and petrochemical products weighing 18.2 million tons, to over 60 countries.