Arab states demand Iran's natural gas

EghtesadOnline: A deputy oil minister expressed the willingness by some Arab States of the Persian Gulf region to import Iran's natural gas in the post-election era as a good opportunity to pursue the matter.

News ID: ۷۷۶۴۰۷

21 May 2017

The Arab States of the Persian Gulf have indirectly said that they wish to negotiate about the matter, said Hamidreza Araqi, who is also the Managing director of the National Iranian Gas Company (NIGC) when asked about negotiations with the Arab States of the Persian Gulf on purchasing Iran's natural gas, IRNA reported.

Although the countries located in the Persian Gulf region have rich reserves of crude oil, they lack enough natural gas resources, but only Iran and Qatar have access to huge resources of natural gas and the capacities for exporting it.

It is estimated that Iraq has also considerable amount of natural gas resources; but due to the present situation in this country, it is not likely they can have access to them before 2018 or even 2020.

With regard to Qatar’s dedication of its North Dome installations to Liquefied Natural Gas (NLG), in fact this country does not have any gas to export via pipelines and so Iran is the only country capable of doing so.

At the moment, Iran is exporting natural gas to Turkey and it is expected to start its export to Iraq in the current year.

Pakistan is another country expressing its willingness to import Iran’s natural gas, but has not taken any measures to construct gas pipelines.

Iran has also had some negotiations with Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait in the realm of exporting natural gas over past years leading to signing a contract with Oman.

Iran has announced that in the coming years will have the capacity of extracting 200 to 300 million square meters of natural gas per day.

The Persian Gulf region has about 730 billion barrels of proven oil reserves and more than 70 trillion square meters of natural gas.