TEHRAN - Daily processing capacity of Iran’s Persian Gulf Star Refinery (PGSR) is going to increase 60,000 barrels per day (bpd) to reach 480,000 by the end of the Iranian calendar month of Shahrivar (September 21, 2020), according to the managing director of the refinery.

Mohammad-Ali Dadvar put the refinery’s current processing capacity at 420,000 bpd, Shana reported on Wednesday.

According to the official, some of the equipment and machinery for the PGSR development project has been already installed and some of them are still being manufactured by Iranian companies.

Dadvar noted that with the increase in the capacity, the refinery’s output is also going to increase by at last 20 percent.

"Currently, an average of 45 million liters of gasoline and 17 million liters of gas oil are produced daily at the refinery and these figures will increase to about 54 million liters and 20 million liters per day, respectively," he said.

The official also underlined the surge in the refinery’s naphtha production capacity, noting that up to four million liters of naphtha is produced in PGSR on a daily basis, most of which is exported to other countries in the region and Europe.

The third phase of PGSR was put into operation in early January 2019 and the fourth phase is going to focus on the optimization of efficiency and production capacity.

Persian Gulf Star Refinery in the southern province of Hormozgan is the first of its kind designed based on gas condensate feedstock received from the South Pars gas field which Iran shares with Qatar in the Persian Gulf.

Construction of the refinery started in 2006, but the project was delayed as the result of some mismanagement and also financial limitation due to the West-led sanctions against Iran.

As the Middle East's largest processing facility for gas condensate, PGSR is planned to play a big role to turn Iran into an exporter of gasoline.

EF/MA