TEHRAN – Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh, on Monday, inaugurated and commissioned 286 gas supply projects in the northeastern Khorasan Razavi province through video conference, IRIB reported.

As part of the mentioned projects, 77 rural areas were connected to the national gas network to increase the coverage of the national network in rural areas to 88 percent, while operations for the gas supply to 39 more villages were also started.

Operations for supplying natural gas to 167 production and industrial units were also started.

The inauguration ceremony was attended by senior officials from the Oil Ministry and Khorasan Razavi province.

Speaking in the ceremony, the minister noted that since the Iranian calendar year 1392 (March 2013-March 2014) up to the current date over 32,000 rural households have been supplied with natural gas through the national network.

According to Zanganeh, currently, about 88 percent of the country’s rural areas are supplied with natural gas through the national network, and over 95 percent of the country’s total population is enjoying natural gas through the national network.

“This coverage is unprecedented in the world,” he stressed.

Zanganeh further explained the ministry’s program for gas supply to the country’s rural areas and said: “We examined all methods of supplying gas to the rural areas, which took a year to study and research, and we came to the conclusion that connecting these areas to the national network is the most economical way.”

With the implementation of this program, thousands of jobs were created, the minister said.

Back in July, the Head of the National Iranian Gas Company (NIGC) Hassan Montazer Torbati had announced that gas supply operations in rural and urban regions of various provinces were ongoing despite the limitations created by the outbreak of the coronavirus.

According to Torbati, in the past few years, every year more than 3,000 villages have been connected to the national gas network.

Earlier, NIGC’s former dispatching director had said that the transmission capacity of the national gas network rose to one billion cubic meters per day (bcm/d).

Noting that several projects were carried out last calendar year (ended on March 19) to increase the country's gas network capacity, Mehdi Jamshidi-Dana said: "Most of the mentioned projects were implemented in the ninth national line."

The official mentioned the South Pars gas field’s new platforms going operational in the current year and noted that with the increase of the national gas network’s capacity the new production capacity from the South Pars platforms won’t be idle.

EF/MA