Iran announces major oil, gas discoveries

Iran says it has discovered 15 billion barrels of new in-place oil reserves, but a top official in Tehran says the country will need huge investments and the latest technologies to exploit those reserves.    

Ali Kardor, the managing director of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), was quoted by the domestic media as saying that around 2 billion barrels of the newly discovered reserves as “recoverable”.

Kardor added that around 1.8 trillion cubic meters (tcm) of in-place reserves of natural gas – of which around half of which he said were recoverable – had also been discovered.  However, he did not specify when and where the new discoveries had been made. 

On the same front, NIOC Director for Corporate Planning Affairs Karim Zobeidi said the overall volume of Iran’s oil reserves stood at 771.53 billion barrels of which around 102 billion barrels would be recoverable at a rate of 24.6 percent.

Zobeidi added that Iran’s in-place reserves of natural gas stand at 55 tcm of which 33 tcm could be recovered at a rate of around 70 percent.

The NIOC chief was further quoted by the Persian-language newspaper Iran as saying that a new round of tenders – that would be held over the next weeks – would help to pave the ground for international energy companies to help develop the country’s oil and gas reserves.   

Kardo also said that Iran’s production of high-quality oil would reach four million barrels per day (mb/d) before April – what could be a landmark success for the country after the sanctions that had kept the country’s production a little above 2 mb/d were lifted in January 2016.