Venezuela calls for greater Iran role in reviving its oil industry

Aissami met Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abollahian, who is touring South America to strengthen relations, in Caracas on Friday.

The Iranian minister called for strengthening of cooperation with Venezuela and implementation of their agreements through removing obstacles and challenges.

Reuters cited unnamed sources as saying that Iranian and Venezuelan firms will start in the coming weeks a 100-day revamp of the South American nation’s largest refining complex to restore its crude distillation capacity.

The effort by state oil firm Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) and the National Iranian Oil Refining and Distribution Company (NIORDC) to boost fuel output at the Paraguana Refining Center marks a step toward ending Venezuela’s reliance on US refinery technology, the sources told the news agency.

Venezuela, which has the world’s largest crude reserves, has struggled in recent years to produce enough gasoline and diesel due to refinery outages as a result of US sanctions and a political turmoil which also has its roots in Washington.

Tehran has strengthened ties with Caracas in recent years, providing crude and condensate as well as parts and feedstock for Venezuela’s aging 1.3 million barrel per day oil (bpd) refining network.

A unit of NIORDC signed a 110-million-euro contract with PDVSA in May to repair Venezuela’s smallest refinery, the 146,000-bpd El Palito in the center of the country, a project that is currently underway.

The companies, the report said, are now expected to sign in the coming weeks a 460-million-euro contract to revamp the 955,000-bpd Paraguana refinery complex on the coast of western Venezuela.

The Paraguana revamp project will allow NIORDC to hire contractors and outsource work to repair five of the complex’s nine distillation units, which do the primary refining of crude oil.

Iran will also be in charge of parts procurement, installation and inspection before handling the refinery’s operations back to PDVSA, the report added.

According to Reuters, the planned distillation unit overhaul will combine Chinese and Iranian parts and equipment in refineries originally built with US technology.

A project to restore the complex’s dilapidated power supply is also planned as part of the revamp, it said.