TEHRAN - Iran says domestic contactors have finished pipe laying operation for a major natural gas project in the Persian Gulf some five years after foreign companies left the project under American pressure.
A Saturday report by the Iranian Oil Ministry’s new service Shana said that laying pipelines at sea for the phase 11 of the South Pars gas field had started on July 28 and ended on Friday.
The report said some 15 kilometers of pipe laying, including for a 32-inch undersea sour gas pipeline, had been completed in the project.
The project was a major part of development operations at Phase 11, the most complicated of all 28 phases of the Iranian side of the South Pars, the world’s largest gas field located on the maritime border between Iran and Qatar in the Persian Gulf.
Iran decided to award the project to domestic companies in 2019, one after French energy giant Total and Chinese contractors pulled out of the project because of a new round of U.S. sanctions on Iran.
Iranian Oil Ministry authorities have announced the country will be able to pump some 28 million cubic meters of natural gas from a fist drilling rig at South Pars Phase 11 in October.
That comes as U.S. sanctions had deprived Iran of the access to technologically sophisticated pressure boosters that could facilitate extraction and transfer of gas from the complicated reservoirs in Phase 11.
Recent reports have shown that Russia’s state petroleum company Gazprom will assist Iran to install the pressure boosters needed in Phase 11.
Shana’s report said the undersea pipeline project that finished on Friday will transfer gas from Phase 11 to a refinery in the southwestern Iranian port of Kangan.