TEHRAN - The director of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC)'s Discovery Department said a new giant oil field is expected to be discovered in southwestern Iran and the discovery operations will be finalized by the end of the current Iranian calendar year (March 2020).

“We expect the discovery of a new oil field to become certain by the yearend and we would be able to deliver the good news to people,” Saleh Hendi told Tasnim news agency.

According to the official the potential field which is very similar to the recently discovered Namavaran reservoir, could be placed between Ab-Teymour and Sepehr fields.

Hendi further noted that this field is going to be a completely new one and it is not part of the already discovered fields or reservoirs.

Back in November, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani announced the discovery of a major oil field with an estimated in-place reserve of 53 billion barrels in southwestern Khuzestan province.

Later on, Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh briefed the press on the details of the newly discovered reservoir in an unveiling ceremony in Tehran.

According to Zanganeh, the reservoir called Namavaran was the second biggest oil reserve discovery in the history of Iran’s oil industry.

Namavaran reservoir covers 2400 square kilometers of land and is placed nearly 3.1 kilometers beneath the ground surface and the thickness of the oil layers is estimated to be about 80 meters, the official explained. 

The area which this oil reservoir covers includes several already discovered oil fields such as Darkhovin, Jofair, Sepehr, Mansouri, Sousangerd and Ab-Teimour, with a total in-place reserve of nearly 31 billion barrels, so the new discovery, in fact, adds nearly 22 billion barrels to the country’s in-place oil reserves, he elaborated.

This year, NIOC’s Exploration Directorate has also signed numerous agreements with Iranian universities and knowledge-based companies for research in various fields of geophysics, geochemistry, unconventional hydrocarbon resources and drilling.

EF/MA