Iran Announces Start of Gas Exports to Iraq
Iran’s Deputy Minister for International Affairs at the Oil Ministry says Tehran has begun exporting gas to Iraq.
Amir Hossein Zamaninia told IRNA news agency that the daily export of seven million cubic meters of gas to Iraq (Baghdad) started Wednesday evening.
Iran signed two gas agreements with Iraq in 2013 and 2015, under which it should export 25 million cubic meters of gas daily to Baghdad and the same amount to Basra.
Iran has been developing its sixth national gas pipeline to transport gas produced from South Pars to Iran’s western borders for several years, and is scheduled to be operational by the end of the year. This pipeline, with a daily capacity of 110 million cubic meters of gas, is designed both to transfer more gas to western provinces and to export to Iraq.
Iraq will use the gas it receives from Iran for power plant operations.
Currently, Iran is exporting gas to Baghdad on a limited basis from other sources, particularly the Ilam gas refinery.
On this matter, Reuters news agency also reports on the start of Iran’s gas exports to Iraq, noting that according to experts, Western sanctions in recent years have damaged Iran’s gas project development programs. Iran, with vast gas resources, previously only exported gas to Turkey.
Since the beginning of 2016, Iran had delayed the start of gas exports to Baghdad several times, as Iranian officials stated that Iraq had not resolved payment method issues and opening of a letter of credit.
Iraq is the second-largest oil-producing country in OPEC after Saudi Arabia, but its gas production is very limited. Last year, Iraq had a total of one billion cubic meters of refined gas production for domestic use. This figure for Iran was over 202 billion cubic meters.
Last year, Iran exported approximately 8.5 billion cubic meters of gas to Turkey. However, Iran also imported nearly seven billion cubic meters of gas from Turkmenistan, but Turkmenistan stopped gas exports to Iran from February of last year due to Tehran’s two-billion-dollar debt.
Iran also has two contracts to export 10 billion cubic meters of gas annually to Oman and six billion cubic meters to Pakistan, but no measures have yet been taken to develop pipelines outside Iranian territory.
Iran intends to increase its gas production from South Pars and other gas fields, with neighboring countries defined as Iran’s export priority.
Source: Radio Farda
