Baku, Azerbaijan, June 24
By Fatih Karimov - Trend: An advanced drilling rig, owned by PetroIran Development Company (PEDCO), was commissioned to start operations at the South Pars gas field's oil layer, said Fazel Jamalzadeh, the managing director of the International Drilling Company, which is a subsidiary of PetroIran.
The second drilling rig, which is among the advanced drilling rigs in the country, was commissioned last week, Iran's Shana news agency quoted Jamalzadeh as saying June 24.
The rig weighs 9000 metric tons and is able to drill at depths of down to 300 feet, he added.
It is predicted that the drilling operations will start in the next couple of weeks, he noted.
Farshid Seyed Hosseini, the managing director of the Iranian Offshore industries Company, said June 23 that the commissioning operations of the platform of the South Pars gas field's oil layer is 90 percent complete and will be handed over to the contractor in the next 15 days.
The platform will have the capacity to process 35,000 barrels of crude oil per day, he added.
Construction of the platform started in Iranian fiscal year 1385 (March 2006-March 2007). It weighs around 890 metric tons, and will be handed over to Petro Iran Company as the contractor, he added.
The oil layer of South Pars gas field is projected to start production in the second half of the next Iranian fiscal year, which will start on March 21, 2016.
The South Pars is shared by Iran and Qatar. While Iran has been unable to take anything out of the oil layer, Qatar has been tapping it since the 1990s and is currently producing 450,000 barrels of crude out of it every day. The country is estimated to have extracted over one billion barrels of oil from South Pars so far.
Edited by CN