Iran Acts to Offset Import Cut
The Iranian oil ministry's legal and international affairs consultant Asghar Hendi said January 13 that Iran has prioritized gas field exploration and development in five regions, one of which, Kopet Dag, is near the border with Turkmenistan in the northeast.
The fields include the Tous gas field, the largest upstream gas project in that region after Khangiran.
Astan Quds Razavi Holding will develop Tous, which contains 60bn m3 of sour gas, aiming for a rate of 4mn m3/d.
Turkmenistan cut the flow of gas to Iran on January 1, claiming the buyer had not repaid a $1.8bn debt after nine years, and had taken less than its contracted quantity.
Currently, only the Khangiran field in the country’s northeast is operating, producing nearly 39mn m³/d of gas, which is equal to the capacity of the region’s sole processing plant, Hashemi Nejad.
Iran has also a very small gas field, Gonbadli which it shares with Turkmenistan and produces less than 0.7mn m3/d. The initial reserves of the field were about 7.5bn m³, but after 30 years it is now nearing the end of its life and the reservoir pressure is much reduced.
Iran has not defined any new gas processing plant projects in its northeast and all of Iran’s gas processing plants are in the south, more than 1,000 km away.
From 2006 to 2016, Iran imported about 74.35bn m3 of Turkmen gas, the official statistics of Iran’s oil ministry show, compared with contractual requirement to take 130bn m³ over the period.
Iran also has a project for building a cross-country pipeline (Igat 11) worth $4.3bn, but it hasn’t started work on that yet. The capacity of the pipeline will be 110mn m³/day, aimed to transit gas from South Pars in southern regions to the northeast.
Iran plans to increase the number of gas compressors from the current 76 to 105 and increase the high pressure transmission pipelines by 5,000 km to 41,000 km by 2020. This will cost about $34bn, according to an official document seen by NGW.
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On the other hand, Iran plans to invest $3bn to increase the underground gas storage capacity at five plants from the current 3bn m3 to about 11.5bn m3 by 2018. All of these storage facilities – Sarajeh, Shourijeh, Yurtesha, Nasrabad and Ghezel Tapeh – are in the north and northeast, the document says. Three more plants are under consideration: Mokhtar, Ahmadi and Bankul/Babaghir. They are in the western half.
Dalga Khatinoglu