Iran’s largest refinery project lures Asians

Iran’s biggest refining project, the $2.8 billion Siraf oil processing plant, is attracting interest from leading Asian economies and the Europeans who are intrigued by an imminent removal of sanctions, its top manager says.

The project includes building a cluster of eight refineries over the next three years to turn oil condensate extracted with gas from Iran’s giant South Pars fields into higher-value products.

“We are seeing strong interest from China, South Korea and Japan, Taiwan for participation — either to take equity in the project or buy the products from us,” CEO of Siraf Refineries Infrastructure Company Alireza Sadeqabadi said.

Iran expects to ship more than 50% of the products to Asia. Once operational, the refineries will turn 480,000 barrels per day (bpd) of condensate to 270,000 bpd of naphtha, 140,000 bpd of gasoil, 30,000 bpd of LPG and 40,000 bpd of kerosene.

Demand in Asia

There is already a strong demand in Asia for naphtha which is used to produce products such as ethylene and propylene, the building blocks of plastics.

According to Sadeqabadi in an interview with financial news and data provider Platts, strong economic growth in countries such as India is expected to generate fresh interest in the product.