Baku, Azerbaijan, Mar. 8
By Fatih Karimov - Trend: Some 391 million cubic meters of gas were consumed by Iranian household, commercial, and industrial units on March 7.
Majid Boujarzadeh, The figure shows 101 million cubic meters rise compared to the same day in the previous year, Iran's Shana news agency reported on March 8.
Moreover, 105 million cubic meters of gas were delivered to power plants, a 13 million cubic meters rise year on year, he added.
Gas consumption in Iran rose by 16.86 billion cubic meters during 346 days since the beginning of the current Iranian fiscal year (March 21, 2014), compared to the same period last year.
Nasser Ebrahimi, director for gas supply at the National Iranian Gas Company, said on March 2 that 83.6 billion cubic meters of gas were consumed by the household sector, commercial, and small industries over the mentioned period.
Last winter, during some weeks, Iran's housing gas consumption reached about 500 mcm per day, which led to cutting gas delivery to power plants, petrochemical units, gas injection to old oil fields and industrial sector, due to gas shortage.
In addition to cutting gas supplies to power plants, which led to burning $30 billion of liquid fuels, the Iranian government had to decrease gas delivery to petrochemical plants from 35 mcm per day in summer to 15 mcm per day in winter. This caused a drop in the petrochemical production by 7.5 million tons during the last fiscal year (starts on March 21).