Iran’s oil industry is the bottleneck of the country’s economy. This is something that the regime has not been able to change over the past 43 years, and 85 percent of the country’s income relies on oil.
Therefore, the country’s economy is struggling to survive because of the sanctions, as many regime experts are saying. This industry in addition to the sanctions is also facing other challenges, which of course it due to the sanctions too, and are enough to collapse the economy.
There is a conflict in the speeches of the regime’s officials. On the one hand, they claim that despite the sanctions the oil industry is facing a boom, and on the other hand, they are forced to confess that this industry is so outdated and wracked that in the future Iran is forced to import gas while having the second most gas resources in the world.
The regime’s claim of self-sufficiency in the oil industry is something like that: “The Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Association of Oil Industry Equipment Manufacturers announced 85% self-sufficiency in the oil industry in the manufacture of equipment for the oil, gas, and petrochemical industry.”
Javad Oji, the regime’s oil minister, increased this number and claimed that the oil industry has become 100 percent independent, something that did not happen even in the best years of the regime in Rafsanjani’s and Khatami’s presidencies.
Oji in an interview with the state-TV News Channel on October 29, 2021, said: “We have a 100% readiness in the upstream sector to produce gas and our refineries, which their overhaul has been fulfilled. With the liquid fuel reserves we have in power plants and industries; Inshallah we will overpass the winter unchallenged.”
This claim is at the time, that this minister before said that because they did not prepare the South Pars gas fields and several other projects in due time, they are suffering irreparable losses.
What the regime’s oil minister has generally called ‘irreparable losses’ has been explained more explicitly by the regime’s oil experts and circles. Although the Iranian regime ranks third in the world in terms of natural resources for oil and gas, it was removed from the list of the world’s 20 largest oil and gas companies due to U.S. sanctions and regime mismanagement, and lack of proper infrastructure.
The State-run news agency ILNA on November 2, 2021, exposed that the regime is not able to invest in the country’s oil industry and wrote:
“Unfortunately, in the past years, the necessary investment in the oil and gas industry has not been made, while we need $160 billion in investment in this area to respond to the country’s needs,’ Oji said Sunday (October 31) at a meeting to coordinate the 2021 budget bill.
“He stated that if there is no investment for development, we will become importers of these products in the future, he added: ‘Projects that do not have economic justification will make trouble for the government, parliament, the economy, and the whole country.’”
The dark prospect for Iran’s oil industry has become obvious even just with these few confessions which reveal the regime’s lies. The truth is that the regime has destroyed the people’s assets due to insufficient attention and exploiting more than the capacity of the oil pits.
