BAKU, Azerbaijan, January 16. Iran can produce oil and gas for 90-100 years with existing hydrocarbon reserves, said Mohsen Khojasteh Mehr, deputy oil minister and CEO of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), Trend reports.
He made the remark at a meeting on discussion of investment opportunities in the provision of drilling rigs in Tehran on January 16.
The deputy minister said that Iran’s current reserves can contribute 340 billion barrels of oil and gas. Iran’s oil and gas production is based on existing 5,000 wells. Iran needs more wells to increase production. This requires more drilling rigs, pumps and other equipments.
Khojasteh Mehr also added that more oil and gas fields discovered by Iran, have not been included in the current reserves yet. Iran is doing some studies to see how much more oil and gas it has.
According to him, developing any oil and gas field in Iran is very expensive. More than half of the finances go to digging. Digging is good for making money, although it has costs.He added that, during the previous
years, Iran’s Oil Ministry could not guarantee anything the investors who wanted to invest in the oil and gas sector. But now, it will give them some guarantees.
There are currently 74 oil and 22 gas fields in Iran. So, 37 oil fields are operating in the territory of the National Iranian South Oil Company (NISOC), 14 fields of the Iranian Central Oil Fields Company (ICOFC), 5 fields of the Arvandan Oil and Gas Company (AOGC), and 18 fields of the Iranian Offshore Oil Company (IOOC).
In addition, 5 gas fields are operating in the territory of the
NISOC, 13 fields are operated by the ICOFC, 1 field is operated by
Pars Oil and Gas Company (POGC), and 3 gas fields are operated by
the IOOC.
Iran’s total hydrocarbon reserves are estimated at 1.2 trillion
barrels. Iran can extract 340 billion barrels with the available
technology and equipment. Thus, 30 percent of the country's
hydrocarbon reserves are recoverable, while 70 percent remain
underground.
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