Azerbaijan, Baku, July.12/ Trend R.Zamanov
Iran's Fajr-e-Jam refinery has resumed gas production, the refinery's Managing Director Rahim Eslami said on Friday. The refinery is located in Iran's southern province of Bushehr.
The refinery had stopped production on July 6 due to an annual repair project, the Mehr News Agency reported. "It is now working to full capacity," Eslami said.
"The refinery's annual repair project took two days less than the predicted time span," he added.
Iran's gas production had faced a 100 to 150 million cubic meter decrease in the repair time.
Iran which sits on the world's second largest natural gas reserves after Russia, is making efforts to up its gas production by increasing foreign and domestic investments, especially in the South Pars gas field.
The country is currently producing around 285 mcm per day of gas and 35,000 barrels of oil from South Pars. This is while Qatar extracts some 450,000 barrels of oil from the gas field's oil layer.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had said that the gas field's production capacity would reach 480 mcm by September equalling Iran and Qatar's pace of tapping the joint gas field.
Iran has extracted 500 billion cubic meters of gas from South Pars over the course of 15 years. Qatar announced last year that its total gas extraction from the field had reached one trillion cubic meters.
Thanks to extracting gas from the joint field, Qatar is currently the world's largest LNG exporter. Its annual LNG exports stands at 77 million tons.
Due to US-generated sanctions against Iran's oil and gas sector, giant foreign companies have left the country's energy projects. This has caused severe problems for Iran in regard to developing joint oil and gas fields.