Iran to up gas production capacity

Iran will increase its natural gas production capacity to 900 million cubic meters (mcm) by 2015, an Iranian official says.

“In the Fifth Development Plan (2010-2015), [Iran’s] natural gas production capacity will increase to 900 million cubic meters (mcm),” Mehr News Agency quoted Asghar Soheilipour, an official with Iran’s Oil Ministry, as saying on Saturday.

“On the other hand, this production capacity has to rise over 1.1 billion mcm per day by [the end of] the 20-Year Outlook Plan (2005-2025),” Soheilipour added.

The Iranian official also said that, along with a rise in natural gas production, a foundation would be made for Iran’s increased participation in natural gas international trade.

In order to materialize a goal of having an eight to ten percent share in natural gas international trade, Iran’s National Gas Company has signed agreements for gas export to Europe through Turkey, as well as to Pakistan, he said.

“Considering the agreements signed to export [natural gas] to Pakistan, Turkey, and negotiations to export [natural gas] to some European and Arab countries, it is predicted that we will soon meet the defined objectives,” the official stated.

“In the area of gas import, we have met 78 percent of the defined objective, and considering the agreement to increase imports from Turkmenistan, this index will also enhance in the future,” he concluded.

Earlier, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his Turkmen counterpart Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov inaugurated the last section of a 1.2-billion-dollar pipeline to export Turkmen gas to Iran.

The 1024-km-pipeline has a daily capacity of 50 mcm.

Iran sits on the world’s second-largest natural gas reserves after Russia, and has long sought to promote itself as a transit route for oil and gas from Central Asian states.