President: Iran to Complete 4 South Pars Phases within Months

The construction of 4 phases of South Pars gas field will have finished by the end of the current year, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said in a televised speech on Tuesday night.

He explained that completion of those phases will add an extra 100 million cubic meters (mcm) to the country’s gas production capacity.

Such an increase in the gas production will help the country to better meet the demand for energy in the wintertime, meaning there would be no problem for supplying natural gas to the industries in the winter, Rouhani added.

In relevant comments in April, Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh announced that phase 12, the biggest development phase of the massive offshore South Pars gas field, will double gas production by the next month.

Phase 12 of the South Pars gas field, the construction of which has witnessed a 95 percent growth, is now producing 14 million cubic meters (mcm) of natural gas per day and the figure will double by the month of Khordad (May 22 - June 21), Zanganeh said.

The South Pars gas field, whose development has been divided into 24 phases, is located in the Persian Gulf straddling the maritime border between Iran and Qatar. It is estimated that the Iranian section of the field contains 14 trillion cubic meters of gas and 18 billion barrels of condensates in place.

South Pars is part of a wider gas field that is shared with Qatar. The larger field covers an area of 9,700 square kilometers, 3,700 square kilometers of which are in Iran's territorial waters (South Pars) in the Persian Gulf. The remaining 6,000 square kilometers, referred to as the North Dome, are in Qatar's territorial waters.