TEHRAN – Iran’s Pars Oil and Gas Company (POGC), which is in charge of developing the country’s giant South Pars gas field in the Persian Gulf, is preparing to begin new drilling operations in this field, an official with the company announced.

Ali Akbar Majed, head of POGC’s Oil and Gas Engineering Department said planning is underway for drilling a new descriptive well at the northern part of the mentioned field to assess the possibility of new reserves, the POGC portal reported on Tuesday.

According to Majed, identifying and exploring undeveloped parts of the South Pars gas field is among POGC’s top programs for maintaining production from this joint field.

“Due to the natural decrease in the pressure of the South Pars field gas reservoir following its production over the last 20 years the production rate of this reservoir will inevitably decline even more in the coming years, so the company has put exploring the undeveloped parts of the field on the agenda by drilling new wells,” the official said.

He further noted that last year another descriptive well was drilled in the eastern part of the South Pars gas field and the results of the drilling operations will become available to the Oil Ministry in the near future.

South Pars gas field, which Iran shares with Qatar in the Persian Gulf, covers an area of 9,700 square kilometers, 3,700 square kilometers of which are in Iran’s territorial waters and the remaining 6,000 square kilometers, called North Dome, are situated in the Arab country’s territorial waters.

The 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 development of the South Pars field started in 1998 and 29 different phases were defined for the project along with a separate oil block. The field, however, is currently divided into 24 standard offshore phases, the output of which is processed by 14 gas refineries on land.

Since the beginning, the field’s development project has gone through so many ups and downs and many foreign and domestic companies have contributed to the completion of the field’s various phases.

Despite all the U.S pressures which led to the departure of almost all of the foreign companies from the project, and despite all the technical and engineering problems faced in the process, Iran has managed to proudly finish the development of almost all the phases of the field and even the field’s oil layer is also producing nearly 50,000 barrels per day (bpd) of oil.

EF/MA