Iran To Bring 67 New Oil And Gas Projects Online By March

67 new oil and gas projects worth some $15 billion should be operational in Iran by next March, the country’s first vice president, Mohammad Mokhber, has said.

Last year, Iran completed $12 billion worth of started but unfinished projects in the oil and gas field, Iran Front News reported.

Iran is currently producing some 3.18 million barrels of oil daily but wants to boost this to 3.3 million bpd by the end of the month. By the end of September, oil output could reach 3.5 million bpd, according to the head of the National Iranian Oil Company.

The average daily figure is a substantial increase over the last two years. When President Ibrahim Raisi took office in 2021, Iran was producing around 2.2 million barrels of oil daily.

The country has also seen its oil exports increase, hitting 1.4 million barrels daily. This is more than what the government had stipulated in the budget for the current fiscal year, which led the head of the Planning and Budget Organization to ask parliament for permission to export more.

Last year, Iran made $42.6 billion from oil exports—an amount exceeding Iran’s oil export revenues in 2016, the first year of the nuclear deal.

The nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, led to the lifting of Western sanctions imposed on Tehran for its nuclear power program. When Donald Trump became U.S. president, however, he reimposed U.S. sanctions, targeting specifically the country’s oil industry.

Despite these sanctions—and the continued failure of the two sides to negotiate a new deal—Iran has been exporting quite a lot of oil, most of it to China. Despite threats from Washington that there will be consequences, these have been slow in coming, allowing China to stock up on discount oil and Iran to find foreign markets for its crude.

Indeed, Kpler has predicted that China’s intake of Iranian crude this month could hit the highest in a decade, despite U.S. sanctions. The figure is seen at 1.5 million barrels daily.

By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com

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