TEHRAN – Iranian Oil Minister Javad Oji has said that phase 11 of the South Pars gas field development plant is going to go operational within the next two months, IRNA reported.

“Considering the measures taken, production will start from phase 11 of South Pars in the next two months,” Oji told IRNA on Saturday.

Talking to the press on the sidelines of the inauguration ceremony of a gas transmission pipeline project in northeastern Iran, the minister also talked of good agreements with giant Chinese companies and a record annual production of natural gas.

He said Iran and China have reached good agreements that will serve the two nations’ interests.

Mentioning the country’s record high sour gas production in the current year (ends on March 20), Oji announced that one billion cubic meters (bcm) of sour gas has been produced in the current Iranian calendar year.

Earlier in January, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said phase 11 of the South Pars gas field development plan is going to reach its final stages in the near future.

“The development of phase 11 of South Pars continued strongly after the foreign contractors quit and it will reach the final stages in the near future,” Raisi said in a cabinet meeting on January 15.

When fully developed, the South Pars phase 11 will have a production capacity of two 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.

Iran had previously awarded the development of the phase 11 project to a consortium comprised of France’s Total, China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), and Petropars which is a subsidiary of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), 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 drilling operation for the first well of mentioned phase was officially started in December 2020. In the early production stage, the output of this phase will reach 500 million cubic feet (equivalent to 14 million cubic meters) per day.

South Pars field, which Iran shares with Qatar in the Persian Gulf, 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