Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 29
By Umid Niayesh - Trend:
Iranian petrochemical units will not face feedstock shortage this winter, Ali Mohammad Bosaqzadeh, an official with the Iranian National Petrochemical Industries Company, said.
New phases of the South Pars gas field will be operational in coming months, which will pave the path to stable feeding of natural gas to the petrochemical units in the winter, Bosaqzadeh said, Iran 's Mehr news agency reported Sept. 29.
In recent years Iran has faced gas shortage in winter and supplied ethane to petrochemical complexes due to an increase of household gas consumption in the cold season.
Iranian petrochemical plants use 37 million cubic meters of natural gas per day, while Iran could deliver only 2.8 million tons of ethane to plants during last year totally. The country planned to increase this volume to 4.2 million tons in current fiscal year.
Phase 15 and 16 of the South Pars gas field have started supplying ethane to the petrochemical units recently, Bosaqzadeh said, adding gas production from phases 12, 15, 16, 17 and 18 will increase.
Phase 17 and 18 of the gas field will start supplying petrochemical units with ethane in the second half of the current Iranian year (started on March 21), the official said.
He also forecasted that Iran 's petrochemical output would experience the long awaited increase this year.
After a huge plunge in Iran 's petrochemical production and export in 2012, the country is re-boosting the figures, but is far from the ideal level as yet.
Before sanctions were imposed in mid-2012, Iran was exporting about 21.226 million tons (MT) of petrochemical products worth $15 billion. But the figure decreased to 14.492 MT in a fiscal year corresponding to 2012 and this level had been kept unchanged until last year, when the figure increased by 18.8 million tons.
Iran also increased a petrochemical production level by 4 MT to 44 MT last year and planned to increase the figure to 51 MT in the current fiscal year. However, the nominal capacity of petrochemical production in Iran is around 60 MT.
Edited by CN
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