Tehran, Iran, May 23
By Milad Fashtami - Trend:
The sour gas production capacity of Iran's South Pars gas field's phase 12 is expected to reach one billion cubic feet per day (25 million cubic meters per day) in two weeks.
Currently, the figure stands at 500 million cubic feet, Iran's SHANA News Agency reported on May 23.
Once all the platforms of the phase come on stream, its production capacity will reach 3 billion cubic feet (75 million cubic meters).
Mohammad Javad Shams, Petropars Company's managing director, said on May 18 that phase 12 is expected to completely come on stream at the cost of $7.5 billion.
"Currently some 8-10 million cubic meters of gas per day is being transferred to the country's national gas network from phase 12," he explained.
"Ten wells have been drilled in the first platform of phase 12," he said, adding that the second and third platforms will come on stream in summer.
South Pars is part of a wider gas field that is shared with Qatar. The larger field covers an area of 9,700 square kilometers, 3,700 square kilometers of which are in Iran's territorial waters (South Pars) in the Persian Gulf.
The remaining 6,000 square kilometers, referred to as the North Dome, are in Qatar's territorial waters.
The Iranian gas field contains 14 trillion cubic meters of natural gas, about eight percent of the world's reserves, and more than 18 billion barrels of LNG resources.
Iran has the world's fourth-largest proved national reserves of oil - most of it cheap to produce - and is home to the biggest proved reserves of natural gas, some 18 percent of the global total.
According to BP's latest yearly report, Iran's dried gas output is about 160 bcm, a little more than domestic consumption level.
Iran exported 7.5 bcm of gas to Turkey and imported 4.5 bcm gas from Turkmenistan in 2012, according to a BP report.