TEHRAN – The managing director of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) has said vast exploration operations are underway on 140,000 square kilometers of offshore and onshore hydrocarbon reserves to discover new deposits, Shana reported.

“Domestic firms, including the National Iranian South Oil Company (NISOC), NIOC’s Exploration Department, and the Oil Industry Research Institute of Iran, have joined hands to discover new oil and gas deposits across the country,” Mohsen Khojasteh-Mehr told reporters on Friday.

Khojasteh-Mehr made the remarks in his speech during a ceremony to commemorate the 115th anniversary of Iran’s first oil exploration in Masjed Soleyman, southwestern province of Khuzestan.

NIOC has a 100-year vision for exploration, he said, underlining, “We are determined to carry out maximum exploration operations in order to discover and maintain the country’s reserves.”

Early studies have been highly promising, indicating that there are still a large number of untapped resources in the country, especially in the oil-rich Khuzestan Province, he added.

“The number of oil and gas wells in Iran exceeds 3,500,” he noted, adding that 70 percent of NIOC’s gas fields and 50 percent of the country’s oilfields were discovered after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

According to the NIOC head, the discovery of hydrocarbon reserves has witnessed a considerable rise over the last 40 years.

Despite the negative impacts of the U.S. sanctions, Iran has been taking new measures for ramping up its oil and gas production and exports over the past few years.

In this regard, NIOC has signed numerous agreements with Iranian universities and knowledge-based companies for research in various fields of geophysics, geochemistry, unconventional hydrocarbon resources, and drilling.

EF/MA