Baku, Azerbaijan, March 31
By Fatih Karimov - Trend: The National Energy Fund of Iran allocated €500 million to the domestic oil projects in the past Iranian calendar year, which ended on March 20, IRNA reported on March 31.
Over half of the sum has been invested in the development of the South Pars gas field, especially in phase 19 of the gas field, the report added.
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 8 percent of the world's reserve, and more than 18 billion barrels of LNG resources.
Iran invested $2 billion out of its National Energy Fund into the giant South Pars gas field in the past two years, deputy director of National Iranian Oil Company, Ali Kardor, said on March 10, Iran's IRIB News Agency reported.
"Iran plans to allocate $5 billion of the fund to the South Pars gas field," he said.
Meanwhile, Iran will allocate 18 percent of assets of the National Development Fund to oil and gas plans in the upstream sector, the Tasnim News Agency reported on March 30.
The money will be paid as financial facilities to investors of the private and cooperative sectors to implement upstream oil and gas projects.
The upstream sector includes the searching for potential underground or underwater crude oil and natural gas fields, drilling of exploratory wells, and subsequently drilling and operating the wells that recover and bring the crude oil and/or raw natural gas to the surface.
The NDF is Iran's sovereign wealth fund. It was founded in 2011 to replace the Oil Stabilization Fund.
The NDF forecasts it total assets increase by $17.5 billion in the current Iranian calendar year, which began on March 21, 2014.
Iran will deposit 31 percent of its oil income to the NDF in the current year. Based on Iran's Fifth Five-Year Development Plan, the NDF's input should be increased by 3 percent by 2015.
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.