Oil, Petrochem Projects Worth $2.7b Launched in Ilam, Bushehr

EghtesadOnline: President Hassan Rouhani on Monday officially inaugurated oil and petrochemical projects valued at $2.7 billion in Ilam and Bushehr provinces via videoconference.

News ID: ۷۸۶۱۵۱

02 March 2021

Costing $1.7 billion, the development of Azar Oilfield in the western Ilam Province was completed in two years, IRNA reported.

Funded by Ahdaf Investment Company and the National Development Fund of Iran, the country's sovereign wealth fund, the venture was undertaken by the Oil Industries Engineering and Construction Group, a leading private engineering, procurement and construction company active in exploration and production, upstream services and energy trade.

Oil extraction from the field started in 2017 with a daily production of 15,000 barrels and reached 30,000 barrels a year later.

Now that the development plan is complete, production from the field has doubled to 65,000 bpd.

The contract for the field was signed by National Iranian Oil Company, OIEC and Ahdaf Investment Company in 2011.

The plan entailed the drilling of 20 wells and construction of 320 km of oil and gas pipelines. Almost 75% of the equipment used in the process were produced by domestic manufacturers.

Stretching over 400 square kilometers, Azar Oilfield is shared with Iraq, where it is known as Badra. It is located 20 kilometers from the city of Mehran in Ilam Province in the Anaran exploration block.

Azar holds 2.5 billion barrels of in-place oil and the volume that can be extracted is around 400 million barrels. It is one of the six fields owned jointly with Iraq, along with Dehloran, West Paydar, Naft-Shahr, Azadegan and Yadavaran.

Although Iran’s oil industry has been hit by US sanctions since mid-2018, which reduced Iran’s oil exports to record lows, Iran has continued to increase production in the hope that the siege will be lifted sooner rather than later.

NGL Recovery Plant

Rouhani also launched the first phase of a natural gas liquid (NGL) recovery plant in Kangan Petro Refining Company in the southern Bushehr Province.

Costing $1 billion, the processing facility has an annual output capacity of 3.5 million tons of NGLs, a group of hydrocarbons including pentane, ethane, propane and butane. The project was funded by Ahdaf Investment Firm, a subsidiary of Iran's Oil Pension Fund Investment Company.

IRNA reported that the sale of NGLs to international markets will generate $1 billion in revenues for KPRC per annum.

Constructed over an area of 65 hectares, the project has created jobs for more than 1,000 people in the southern province.

The NGL processing plant receives 21 million tons of natural gas (as feedstock) per year from Phase 12 of the South Pars Gas Field in the Persian Gulf for producing 2 million tons of ethane, 1 million tons of propane, 500,000 tons of butane and 250,000 tons of pentane annually.

Kian Petrochemical Complex

The construction of a $4.2 billion Kian Petrochemical Complex in Asalouyeh, Bushehr Province, started on Monday.

Spread over 75 hectares, the plant will annually receive close to 2.5 million tons of NGLs as feedstock to produce a wide range of commodities, including olefin, butadiene, ethylene, propylene, benzene, propanol and hexanol.

The plant is jointly financed by Parsian Oil and Gas Development Company (Private Joint Stock) and Petro-Farhang Holding Company (a subsidiary of Teachers Investment Fund).

There are 56 petrochemical companies in Iran producing 60 million tons of products a year.

About 35 million tons, including ethylene and propylene, are used as feedstock in domestic petrochemical complexes to produce plastic, detergents, solvents, paints, fertilizer, pesticides, synthetic fibers and rubber. The rest is sold in international markets.

Petrochemicals constitute more than one-fourth of Iran’s non-oil exports with products dispatched to 30 countries, namely neighboring states, China, India, Southeast Asia and Europe.