Islamic Republic of Iran to Increase Petrochemical Products

Director of the National Iranian Petrochemical Company (NIPC) Abdolhossein Bayat stressed that Iran plans to boost the volume of its petrochemical products by building dozens of production units across the country.
Bayat said on Saturday that Iran’s annual production of various petrochemical products will hit 60 million tons from the current figure of 42 million tons by the end of the current Iranian calendar year, which ends on March 19, 2012.

Bayat said that the increase is due to the implementation of a number of petrochemical projects with a capacity of eight million tons and a rise in the feed of the country’s petrochemical complexes.

He went on to say that about 45 percent of the total production of the country is exported, adding that the Islamic Republic exported 18 million tons of petrochemical goods worth $11.6 billion in the previous Iranian calendar year (March 2010-March 2011).

Iran, the world’s fifth largest oil producer, exported around 14mln tons of petrochemical products worth more than $12bln in 2010.

The country inaugurated a number of giant petrochemical projects in Khuzestan province in Southwestern Iran in February in the presence of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

One of the projects was Amir Kabir Light Petrochemical Polyethylene worth $310 million with a production capacity of 300,000 tons a year.

The project was completed at a time when foreign companies such as Siemens of Germany stopped cooperation in the project under the pretext of the sanctions imposed on Iran by the US and EU.

The other petrochemical units included the light polyethylene of Amir Kabir Complex, part of phase 2 of Fajr Complex and the hard polystyrene unit of Tabriz Complex.