TEHRAN – Head of Iran’s National Petrochemical Company (NPC) says a project for producing polymer from natural gas is going to be conducted in the country for the first time in the next Iranian calendar year (March 2020-March 2021).

Speaking in an expert desk on promotion of domestic production on Wednesday, Behzad Mohammadi said two major leaps have been provisioned for the country’s petrochemical industry by the Iranian calendar year of 1400 (starts in March 2021), based on which 27 projects will be completed and another 28 projects worth $18 billion are planned to be started across the country.

According to Mohammadi, the country’s petrochemical production capacity is going to double by the end of Iranian calendar year of 1404 (March 2026).

“So far, $53 billion has been invested in the country's petrochemical industry, and with the third leap in this sector, the number is going to increase to $93 billion by the [Iranian calendar] year of 1404, which means a 75-percent growth,” he said in a conference on oil and energy in Tehran in October 2019.

In early November 2019, the official had said that Iran’s petrochemical industry will be accounting for 6.2 percent of the total global petrochemical output by 2025.

Iranian petrochemical industry is strongly moving forward despite the pressures that the U.S. sanctions have imposed on the industry, the NPC head said.

The deputy oil minister furthered noted that there are currently 56 active petrochemical complexes across the country which receive 33 million tons of feedstock annually (equivalent to 650,000 barrels of crude oil per day). 

The official further said that Iran’s annual petrochemical revenue had reached $17 billion from only $200,000 back in 1979, the year the Islamic Revolution became victorious. He also said the sector's revenues would cross 37 billion dollars per year by 2025. 

In late September, Director of NPC’s Projects Ali-Mohammad Bosaqzadeh had said that Iran's annual petrochemical output is planned to reach more than 100 million tons by the Iranian calendar year of 1400 and to 130 million tons or nearly doubled by 1404.

EF/MA