Tehran, Iran, Dec. 27
By Milad Fashtami - Trend:
Iran will take punitive measures against Sinopec Company if it comes to the conclusion that the Chinese contractor is to be blamed for over 2 year-delays in Yadavaran oilfield development plan.
Abdolreza Haji Hosseinnejad, the managing director of Iran's Petroleum Engineering and Development Company (PEDEC), said that the project was scheduled to be finished in 50 months, but now it seems that it will take the Chinese firm 80 months to complete it, Iran's Mehr News Agency reported on Dec. 27.
"We will definitely reveal the reasons of this long delay. If we come to the conclusion that the Chinese firm is to be blamed, we will not pay them the reward included in the contract," he explained.
"We were supposed to nearly double output at the Yadavaran oilfield to 50,000 barrels per day (bpd) in the previous calendar year (which ended on March 21)," Haji Hosseinnejad said, adding that the goal has not been achieved yet.
Yadavaran oilfield is estimated to hold around 12 billion barrels of in-situ crude oil, some 12.5 trillion cubic feet of associated gases, as well as nearly 1.9 billion barrels of condensates.
The oilfield output is projected to reach 300,000 bpd in three phases.
Iran and the Chinese Sinopec signed a buyback contract in 2007 on the Yadavaran oilfield development.
Iran shares oil and gas fields with most of its neighbors, including Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, as well as Oman and Turkmenistan.
Based on exploration, there are 23 joint hydrocarbon fields between Iran and Iraq which are divided into exploration, development and production categories.
The country's total in-place oil reserves have been estimated at more than 560 billion barrels, with about 140 billion barrels of extractable oil. Moreover, heavy and extra heavy varieties of crude oil account for roughly 70-100 billion barrels of the total reserves.