Iran oil output rose 11% in four months

An Iranian deputy oil minister says Iran’s oil production increased by 11 percent in the first four months of the current Iranian year (started March 21).

Iranian Deputy Oil Minister for planning and supervision on hydrocarbon resources Mansour Moazzami said on Monday that Iran will raise its oil production by 700,000 barrels per day (bpd) within the next three years.

In May, Mohsen Qamsari, the director for international affairs at the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), said that the oil production of the Islamic Republic would reach four million barrels per days by the end of the current Persian calendar year in March 2015.

He also said a potential lifting of US-led sanctions against Iran would “facilitate oil exports” for the Islamic Republic.

Iran’s total in-place oil reserves have been estimated at more than 560 billion barrels, with about 140 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Heavy and extra heavy varieties of crude oil account for roughly 70-100 billion barrels of the total reserves.

On Monday, Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh said the Islamic Republic plans to increase its natural gas production by 200 million cubic meters per day (mcm/day) by March 2015.

Iran holds the second largest natural gas reserves in the world after Russia, with estimated 33 plus trillion cubic meters of extractable deposits.