As much as 25 billion dollars have been invested in upstream sector projects since the beginning of current Iranian calendar year, on 20 March 2012.
Addressing Sunday at the fifth conference on promoting financing system in Iran, Iranian minister of petroleum, Rostam Qasemi , made the remarks adding the country with enormous opportunities in oil and gas industry has great potentials for making progress.
Qasemi said that boosting investments in the country is an inevitable issue adding the country should invest as much as 400 billion dollars, especially in upstream sector, to achieve its targets under the fifth five-year development plan.
“Of 27 shared oil and gas fields, executive work has been started at 23 fields after finalization of their development contracts” , Qasemi said.
He continued: “Various kinds of investment were underway at shared oil and gas fields including deploying existing resources, buy back contracts and private sector’s investment noting foreign countries have invested 20 billion dollars at upstream sector recently implying rising investments in comparison to past few months.”
“Previously Central Bank of Iran (CBI) deposited its money in foreign banks but under an agreement with the body, it will direct its investments toward oil industry”, the official said.
Referring to status quo of the country and illegal sanctions, Qasemi said: “We should rise production capacity at mid-stream sector and protect our place in OPEC with regard to sensitivity of oil market and at the same time to try to curb selling materials in raw form.”
Referring to downstream sector potentials, Qasemi said that petrochemical nameplate capacity stood at 75 million tons per year adding 70 petrochemical units are under construction with different levels of progress from 5 to 95 percent.
[mappress] LNG World News Staff, January 07, 2013