Baku, Azerbaijan, Aug.30
By Fatih Karimov - Trend:
Iran will sell oil products by the next month in the bourse to fund the South Pars gas field development project.
Iran's oil minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh said the first batch of oil products, worth $100 million, will be offered on the bourse as a means to provide finance for the South Pars gas field development project, Iran's Mehr news agency reported on August 30.
He added that there is no limitation for foreigners to buy the oil products.
Zanganeh said on July 26 that Iran plans to boost gas production from the South Pars field by 100 million cubic meters.
It is hoped that the gas field's output will be increased by 100 mcm by the end of the current year.
The current Iranian year began on March 21.
Iran is currently producing 300mcm per day of gas from the South Pars.
The South Pars field has 14 trillion cubic meters of natural gas - or about eight percent of the world's reserves - and more than 18 billion barrels of liquefied natural gas resources.
The field 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 Gulf.
The remaining 6,000 square kilometers, referred to as the North Dome, are in Qatar's territorial waters.
Iran's share of the gas field is divided into 29 phases, but just 10 phases are currently operational. No phases of the South Pars gas field have recently come on stream. The country has recently started producing 14 million cubic meters of gas from the Phase 12.
The phase's output is scheduled to reach to 28 million cubic meters by June. The output of the Phase 12, itself is equal to total output of three phases of the gas field. So far some $6 billion were invested in Phase 12.
Iran sits on the world's largest natural gas reserves. The country's estimated reserves are around 33.6 trillion cubic meters.