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News ID: 88140
Publish Date : 01 March 2021 - 22:01

Iran Opens Petroleum Projects Worth $2.7 Billion

TEHRAN (Press TV) -- Two massive Iranian petroleum projects with an investment of $2.7 billion came online Monday in a fresh blow to U.S. sanctions targeting the country’s energy sector.
President Hassan Rouhani used a video conference call to inaugurate the project located in oil-rich regions in the west and south of the country.
Rouhani’s website said the government had spent 1.441 billion euros ($1.74 billion) to ramp up oil production in Azar oil field, a reserve Iran shares with neighboring Iraq, to 65,000 barrels per day.
Iranian engineers have carried out the bulk of the development work in Azar, located in the province of Ilam, where operations had stalled in recent years because of U.S. sanctions on Iran.
Rouhani hailed Iranian engineers and technicians for successfully drilling oil wells in Azar that some of them had a depth of 4,800 meters.
The Iranian president also inaugurated a privately-owned petrochemical and refinery complex located in the province of Bushehr on the Persian Gulf coast.
The facility enables Iran to increase its petrochemical feedstock production capacity by 2.5 million tons per year.
The two projects will create over 1,400 permanent jobs, mostly for local people, according to Rouhani’s website.
Rouhani also ordered the start of construction works for Kian Petrochemicals, a giant plant in Bushehr for which around $4.12 billion will be invested by private owners.
The Iranian government has spent heavily to build up downstream petroleum industries in areas near the South Pars gas field, the world’s largest gas reserve which is located in the Persian Gulf and is shared between Iran and Qatar.
Iran is currently extracting over 750 million cubic meters per day of natural gas from the field, the bulk of which is supplied to households and businesses and the rest in fed into refineries and petrochemical plants.
Rouhani said the world and the United States will finally have to lift the unjust sanctions that have been imposed on the Iranian nation and submit to its will.
"I am certain that the world and the United States will have to kneel before this great nation’s will and lift unjust sanctions,” he said.
Referring to the failure of the U.S. policy of exerting "maximum pressure” on Iran under former president Donald Trump, he said, "That butcher and murderer has fallen now and the new American administration has so far admitted on four occasions that the maximum pressure of the previous administration was wrong.”
"This is our greatest achievement in history,” Rouhani said, adding, "Thanks to steadfastness of our nation, those who imposed these sanctions on us now confess that sanctions and pressure have been to no avail.”