Iran, Norway Planning Joint FLNG Project

Iran is working on a plan with a Norwegian company to build a floating facility to liquefy natural gas in the Persian Gulf, an Iranian official said.

Ali Kardor, the vice president for finance and investment affairs of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), was quoted by the media as saying that the project – technically referred to as FLNG – will be used to support Iran’s exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe and the Far East.

Kardor added that the Norwegian company – which he did not name – will send a ship that will specialize for the same type of project to Iran’s ports in the Persian Gulf by March 2017, Press TV reported.

Iran previously pursued three key LNG projects – Iran LNG, Pars LNG and Persian LNG. However, they were abandoned over the past few years as technicalities emerged – mostly those pertaining to US-led sanctions against investments in Iran’s energy projects.

NIOC chief Rokneddin Javadi said last October that LNG has returned to Iran’s energy agenda, stressing that the country has devised serious plans to launch its first liquefaction project by April 2018.

The country is already working on a plan to pipe natural gas to Oman and use the liquefaction facilities of the Persian Gulf sultanate to export LNG to overseas markets.

Based on an early agreement that Iran signed with Oman in 2013, Iran will pipe a daily of 28 million cubic meters (mcm) of gas to Oman through a sub-sea pipeline. Some of the gas thus transferred will be turned into LNG in the country’s Qalhat LNG plant for Iran to use as per its export plans.