Tehran, Iran, Jan. 22
By Kamyar Eghbal – Trend:
An Iranian official has said that the volume of the country’s exports of petrochemicals have increased over the past months.
“Exports of Iranian petrochemical products has increased but in some field of commodities such as bitumen we faced a decline in exports and, also in oils and paraffin,”Abbasali Eslami, the head of the Iranian association for oil products exporters, told Trend.
The volume of the exports of the Iranian petrochemical producers over the nine months of the current fiscal year (starting March 20) has reached 16.4 million tons.
Abbasali Eslami touched upon the plans to lure investment into the country’s petrochemical industry, calling on the official to devise accurate plans for drawing investments into the industry.
He warned against the growing number of permissions issued by the government to create petrochemical units, saying the lack of accurate plans to issue investment permissions in the country’s petrochemical industry may inflict harms to the economy.
“This could lead to the excessive production of similar materials by various producers,” he said.
Iranian petrochemical plants produced 39.9 million tons of petrochemical products during the first nine months of the current Iranian fiscal year (March 20-Dec. 21).
This is while, the output of Iran’s 57 petrochemical complexes stood at 4.3 million tons in the last Iranian calendar month (Nov. 22-Dec. 21).
Iran plans to inaugurate seven petrochemical plants in the current year and 23 more in the next year.
In total, 64 petrochemical projects are expected to become operational in Iran by 2021 to double the country’s nominal production capacity in the next five years.
Iran needs $20 billion worth of investments to hit the target and further $35 billion of investment is needed to increase the figure to 150 million tons per year by 2025.