TEHRAN – Managing Director of Iran’s Mapna Drilling Company said that an offshore drilling rig belonging to the company is shipped toward the Iran-Qatar territorial waters in the Persian Gulf to start drilling operations in South Pars Phase 11.

According to Fazel Jamalzadeh, Mapna Drilling has signed a contract with Petropars, which is in charge of developing Phase 11 of the giant gas field, for drilling 12 wells in the mentioned phase.

The drilling operations will be carried out in two stages, the official said.

“In the first stage five wells including one vertical and four horizontal wells will be drilled for the platform SPD-11B of this phase, and after the installation of the topside, seven more wells will be drilled in the second stage,” he added.

Engineering and technical monitoring and supervision of all the mentioned operations will be carried out by local experts and engineers, Jamalzadeh stressed.

Development of the South Pars phase 11 was officially started in May after several years of hiatus due to various financial and technical issues.

In November 2016, Iran signed a $4.8 billion agreement with a consortium including France’s Total, China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and Petropars, a subsidiary of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) on development of phase 11, however Total and CNPCI, pulled out of the project in 2019 due to the U.S. sanctions.

Currently, Petropars is developing the phase 11 project after its partners left the contract.

The South Pars phase 11 project will have a production capacity of 2 billion cubic feet per day or 370 000 barrels of oil equivalent per day. The produced gas will be fed into Iran's gas network.

With phase 11 going online, 56 million cubic meters of capacity will be added to the country’s extraction from South Pars which Iran shares with Qatar in the Persian Gulf.

South Pars is the world’s largest gas field, covering an area of 3,700 square kilometers of Iran’s territorial waters.

The giant field is estimated to contain a significant amount of natural gas, accounting for about eight percent of the world’s reserves, and approximately 18 billion barrels of condensate. The field is divided into 24 standard phases.

EF/MA