Baku, Azerbaijan, March. 1
By Khalid Kazimov - Trend:
An Iranian lawmaker has criticized those who censure the country's new model of oil contracts (IPC) proposed by Oil Ministry aimed at luring foreign investment.
Gholamreza Mesbahi-Moghadam the head of parliament's Planning and Budget Commission, has said that the points made by the critics are not rational, ILNA news agency reported.
"If the contracts do not lack any legal problems, there are no obstacles against the international companies' long term investment in oil sector," Mesbahi-Moghadam adedd.
Describing the investment of foreign companies in oil sector as a positive move, he said that the contracts still need to be carefully studied.
Iran's oil ministry has already called for $200 billion of investment for development of country's oil industry suggesting the Islamic Republic doesn't have enough of domestic sources to develop the oil industry, thus foreign investment is needed.
Iranian oil industry's upstream projects need $130 billion of investment while the downstream projects demand $70 billion to be developed.
In 2015 Tehran hosted 137 companies from 45 countries for a two-day conference, during which legal generalities of the new model of oil contracts (IPC) were introduced. However, some Iranian conservatives protested against the IPC suggesting the new model of the oil contract is against the Iranian constitution.
The IPC is a framework that lays out the basic structure - and some details - regarding all future petroleum contracts in Iran. It was earlier announced that the country plans to boost oil production to 5.7 million barrels a day and gas output to 1.4 billion cubic meters a day by 2021.
By holding 157.8 billion barrels of recoverable crude oil reserves, Iran possesses the world's fourth largest reserves of crude oil. The Islamic Republic also holds 34 trillion cubic meters of proven gas reserves, sharing 18.2 percent of total global gas reserves.
According to a recent report by OPEC Iran's oil production in January was estimated to be around 2.925 million barrels per day of which about 1.3 million barrels were exported.