The Iranian government announced on Sunday March 17 a series of contracts, worth $13 billion, to increase its oil production, despite sanctions imposed by the United States since 2018.
The ambition of these projects, which concern six fields in the south and southwest of the country, is to increase oil production “by nearly 400,000 barrels” per day, declared the minister responsible for oil, Javad Owji .
This program should increase oil revenues by “15 billion dollars per year”, he added, during the signing ceremony organized in Tehran, on the day of the 73rd anniversary of the nationalization of the oil industry, in 1951.
Mr. Owji recently set the country’s production at four million barrels per day in March 2025, the end of the next year of the Persian calendar. The ministry said these contracts were “the largest in a decade”, a period during which the sector suffered from underinvestment.
Production on the rise
To implement them, Iran does not rely “on foreign companies or financing,” according to Mr. Owji. Iran, a member of OPEC, has the third largest oil and second largest gas reserves in the world, according to statistics from the U.S. Energy Agency.
Despite this abundance, its crude production fell in 2020 to its lowest level in three decades, due to severe international sanctions imposed following the unilateral withdrawal in 2018 of the United States from the nuclear agreement. Foreign multinationals then left Iran.
But crude oil production has started to rise again in recent months, driven in particular by exports to China. One of the main contracts signed on Sunday concerns the Azadegan field, in the Khuzestan province (South-West), where the country’s main deposits are located.
The Iranian government recently unveiled a $20 billion program for the development, by four national companies, of the world’s largest natural gas field, South Pars, located in the Persian Gulf and straddling the waters territorial territories of Iran and Qatar.
