Baku, Azerbaijan, Aug. 20
By Fatih Karimov – Trend:
Iran has no plan to buy petrochemical units abroad in particular in Europe or Asia, Ahmad Mahdavi, secretary-general of the Association of Petrochemical Industry Corporations, said.
Buying stocks of profitable petrochemical companies across the world can be a suitable economic strategy for Iranian investors, but the country’s private sector currently has no such plans, Mahdavi said, Mehr news agency reported.
Currently there is a $60 billion investment capacity in Iran’s petrochemical sector thanks to removal of international sanctions, Mahdavi said, adding that investment in Iran’s petrochemical sector enjoys various advantages including huge oil and gas reserves, diverse resources of petrochemical feedstock, access to international waters as well as close distance to big markets such as India, China, Turkey and Central Asian and Caucasian countries.
Given the aforementioned advantages, buying shares of foreign petrochemical units is not a priority for the country’s private sector, Mahdavi said.
Iran bought 60 percent of a polyethylene plant in Mariveles, Bataan (northwest of Manila, Philippines) in 2007 to send surplus ethylene to the country for producing polyethylene for export to Iran and Southeast Asian countries as well as the EU markets. Later however, the country faced ethylene shortage inside the country, which turned the plan into disaster.
Iran’s petrochemical officials earlier announced that the idea of transferring some part of the activities abroad is not economically justified for the time being.
The country’s actual production capacity is around 61 million tons per annum, but the shortage of natural gas as feedstock, old production units, and the problem of sanctions, which forced exports to drop, caused petrochemical complexes to work at lower capacities.
The Islamic Republic hopes to bring this capacity to 120 million tons by 2020 and 180 million tons by 2025.
Iran produced 46.4 million tons of petrochemical products during the last fiscal year, but for the current year, the figure is planned to reach 54.7 million tons.