Iran: Revived LNG Project Is Almost 50% Complete

Construction works at Iran’s revived LNG project is almost 50% complete, the Islamic Republic claims.   

“Progress at this project now stands at almost 50pc,” Abdolhossein Bayat, chairman of oil industry pension fund investment company Opic, said, as quoted by Argus.  

Works on the project in Iran’s southern province of Bushehr were restarted in March this year. The Iran LNG project is planned to have a capacity of 10.8 million tons per year. The Islamic Republic aims to have the project operational by the middle of 2025, when the term in office of the current Iranian administration ends.

Earlier this year, the office of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said that Raisi visited the Iran LNG project site. The project covers an area of 200 hectares and will include two operational lines of LNG production with a total annual capacity of 10.8 million tons, which in addition to LNG would produce other products such as LPG, gas condensate, and sulfur, the president’s office said.

If the Iran LNG project goes as planned, it would be the Islamic Republic’s first such facility.

Earlier in the 2000s, Iran, which has some of the world’s largest reserves of gas, had planned LNG facilities with supermajors including Total and Shell, but those were all scrapped after the first wave of U.S. and Western sanctions on Iran’s energy industry and exports over its nuclear program.

Iran holds the world’s second-largest natural gas reserves, after Russia and ahead of Qatar.

With 32 trillion cubic meters, Iran is home to 16% of the global total.

A lot of Iran’s gas reserves are concentrated in the South Pars offshore field in the Persian Gulf, which it shares with Qatar. Total production for 2020 reached 234 billion cubic meters or a daily average of 645 million cubic meters.

Development of the country’s massive gas reserves has been challenging because of the pullout of Western supermajors such as TotalEnergies in the wake of the reinstated U.S. sanctions against Tehran.

By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com

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