Baku, Azerbaijan, Oct. 19
By Fatih Karimov – Trend
Iran plans to start extracting oil from the South Pars oil layer from early 2017, Ali Kardor, the Islamic Republic’s deputy oil minister, said.
Iran eyes to pump 35,000 barrels of crude oil a day from the field which it shares with Qatar in the first phase of the project, Kardor said, Mehr news agency reported Oct. 19.
Kardor, who heads the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), said that Iran purchased a floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) unit for extracting oil from the layer which is currently in one of the Persian Gulf states.
The FPSO was manufactured in Singapore for $300 million, he said, adding that it will be transferred to its planned location in South Pars in January 2017.
FPSO unit is a floating vessel used by the offshore oil and gas industry for the production, processing of hydrocarbons and for storage of oil. An FPSO vessel is designed to receive hydrocarbons produced by itself or from nearby platforms or subsea template, process them, and store oil until it can be offloaded onto a tanker or, less frequently, transported through a pipeline.
The installation process of the FPSO will be completed within two months, Kardor said.
Iran plans to extract 200,000 barrels of crude oil from the South Pars oil layer in next 20 years. At least 300 wells will be drilled in this regard.
It was earlier announced that Tehran will offer second phase of the layer development project to foreigners.
Kardor said in August that Iranian companies are working on the first phase of the project, but they lack the necessary technology for development of other phases.
South Pars gas field is divided into 24 development phases and contains 40 trillion cubic meters of natural gas.
It covers an area of 9,700 square kilometers, 3,700 square kilometers of which are in Iran's territorial waters in the Persian Gulf. The remaining 6,000 square kilometers are situated in Qatar's territorial waters.
Currently Iran’s gas production in the field stands at 430 million cubic meters per day.