TEHRAN - Iranian vice president for technological and scientific affairs has said that based on the country’s seventh five-year National Development Plan (2022-2026), $35 billion of investment is going to be made in the country’s petrochemical industry.

“In the seventh [national development] plan, 35 billion dollars of investment in the petrochemical industry is predicted, from which the share of the Persian Gulf Petrochemical Industries Company (PGPIC) is 15 billion dollars,” Ruhollah Dehghani Firouzabadi said in a conference on the application of new technologies in the petrochemical industry (called Petrofan) on Sunday.

According to Firouzabadi, selling raw materials in the petrochemical industry can have an 80 percent benefit rate but using new technologies in this sector can increase its benefits up to 1,000 percent.

“For every one dollar of investment in this industry, eight dollars of profit has been made and with the investment made so far, one billion dollars of value has been created,” the official said.

The petrochemical industry plays a crucial role in Iran’s non-oil economy, as petrochemical export is the second-largest source of revenue for the country after crude oil. Petrochemical exports already constitute nearly 33 percent of the country’s non-oil exports.

Iran has been highly developing this sector over the recent years as the development of the giant South Pars gas field (Iran shares with Qatar in the Persian Gulf) has been supplying more feedstock to the petrochemical units.

Also, the U.S. sanctioning Iran’s oil exports has encouraged more development of the petrochemical industry to boost exports from this sector.

Balanced development of the petrochemical industry has also been of particular interest among the National Petrochemical Company (NPC) strategies for the current year since the development of downstream industries will prevent the sale of raw materials and result in the production of products with higher added value.

Domestic equipment, licenses, and technological knowledge have been used in most of the underway and completed projects in this industry.

EF/MA