Four New Phases of South Pars Come Online

Date: 17 March 2019 - 19:43

News ID: ۶۴۳۲۷

TEHRAN (Dispatches) -- President Hassan Rouhani formally inaugurated four new phases of South Pars, the world’s largest gas field, on Sunday, according to a statement posted by the Iranian Ministry of Petroleum on Twitter.
Iran has invested $11 billion to complete the four phases and they will increase the country’s gas production capacity by up to 110 million cubic meters per day, the statement said.
"Today is a very auspicious day for the Iranian nation, which has dealt strong blows to enemies, because they thought that by imposing sanctions, they would be able to stop all our plans and advances,” Rouhani added.
Minister of Petroleum Bijan Zangeneh said on Saturday that Iran, which share South Pars with Qatar, expects to operate 27 phases by next March.
With their launch, Iran’s daily gas production will be surpassing that of Qatar with which it shares the offshore field.
The $5 billion refinery for phase 13 which was inaugurated on Sunday had already become fully operational. The first shipping of its gas condensate was delivered on March 11 for export, the project’s operator Payam Motamed said last week. Another refinery for phases 22, 23 and 24 also came online Sunday.
Each plant has a capacity to process 56 million cubic meters of gas per day and convert it to LPG, ethane, condensate and sulfur worth $5.5 billion a year at the going market prices, the ministry’s Shana news outlet said. The revenue, it said, will account for 2 percent of Iran’s GDP of some $427 billion.
France’s Total and China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) suspended investment in phase 11 of South Pars last year after the United States threatened to impose sanctions on companies that do business in Iran.
Zangeneh said on Saturday that talks are continuing with CNPC.
"America’s sanctions against Iran are a crime against humanity,” Rouhani said in a speech from Bushehr province in southern Iran.
"Americans did not want us to inaugurate any important projects during the current year, but we made all projects operational on schedule,” he added.
Rouhani said the sanctions are are psychological war through which America is trying to make the Iranians pessimistic about their future and make them believe that as time goes by, their conditions will deteriorate.
The president also said Rouhani is ready to establish good relations with all its neighboring countries with an objective of advancing the region’s interests.
He said any strains in ties between the Islamic Republic and some of its neighbors had been initiated by the opposite side.
"We have a good relationship with our neighbors, including Qatar, Oman, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and we want such a relationship to exist between us and all of our neighbors,” he added.
Rouhani said it didn’t matter for Iran whether countries were Shia-majority or Sunni-majority or whether they were located north of the Persian Gulf or to its south. "Our goal must be the development of the entire region.”
He said that in spite of attempts by the U.S., the occupying regime of Israel and "some reactionary regional countries” to exert pressure on the Iranian nation, Iran would continue on its path and develop better relations with its neighbors day by day.
The Iranian president further referred to his recent visit to Iraq and hailed Tehran-Baghdad ties as "exemplary”. He said good bilateral agreements had been reached during his trip to Iraq.
Heading a high-ranking delegation, Rouhani visited Iraq on March 11-13, which featured several meetings and the signing of memorandums of understanding for the expansion of bilateral relations in various fields.
In a joint statement, Tehran and Baghdad praised Rouhani’s historic visit to Iraq as a "turning point” in efforts to strengthen "strategic” relations between the two nations.