Azerbaijan, Baku, June 8 / Trend R.Zamanov /
Iran plans to swap one million barrels of oil in near future, managing director of National Iranian Oil Company Ahmad Qalebani said on Saturday.
Iran currently has the capacity to swap 500,000 barrels of oil each day, the Mehr News Agency quoted Ahmad Qalebani as saying.
According to him, Iran has currently stopped oil swap.
Unfortunately, Iran is not using its oil swap capacity at all, he explained.
Some officials in the NIOC are against the involvement of the private sector in oil swap business, he added.
Managing Director of the National Iranian Oil Products Distribution Company (NIOPDC) Mostafa Kashkouli said in March that Iran plans to increase the volume of its oil products swap by 30 percent in the current Iranian year (ending March 20, 2013).
Mostafa Kashkouli said on Saturday that Iran swapped more than 100,000 tons of oil products in the previous year and that it planned to boost its swap volume, Presss TV reported.
"The swap of oil products, including gasoline, diesel and liquefied natural gas (LNG), will increase by 30 percent this year compared to the previous year," he said.
Kashkouli said that Iran has, for the first time, expressed readiness to do a swap deal for LNG with Caspian Sea littoral states.
According to the official, the liquefied gas shipments will be offloaded at Neka port in northern Iran and the equivalent volume of oil will be delivered to foreign buyers in Bandar Abbas and Mahshar ports in the Persian Gulf in southern Iran.
He also said that in the previous year the main part of Iran's oil product exports fell to diesel, which was delivered to such neighboring countries as Iraq and Afghanistan.