Gholamreza Dehghan Nasrabadi, a member of the Iranian regime’s Parliament, announced a deepening energy imbalance in Iran and claimed that the country needs to import two billion dollars of gasoline this year.
Dehghan Nasrabadi said on Friday, June 22: “It is estimated that this year we will have over two billion dollars in gasoline imports, which is approximately equivalent to building a refinery with a capacity of 100,000 barrels per day.”
Since last year, Iran has faced a gasoline shortage due to the government’s inability to build new oil refineries.
An official document from the Ministry of Oil shows that last year, the production of gasoline by the country’s refineries grew by only 1.5%, while the country’s gasoline consumption increased by 10.5%.
The large increase in gasoline consumption was due to the entry of one million inefficient and domestically produced cars into the market.
To compensate for this deficit, the government has mixed significant amounts of petrochemical and chemical substances into the gasoline produced by refineries; the combination of chemical substances in the country’s gasoline has increased by 280% over the past three years.
In fact, according to the Ministry of Oil’s document, last year the production of gasoline by the country’s refineries reached slightly over 97 million liters per day. However, the government mixed a huge volume of aromatic, chemical, and petrochemical-produced gasoline with regular gasoline, raising the volume of gasoline delivered to fuel stations to more than 111 million liters per day.
The country’s gasoline consumption was also above 115 million liters, with the remaining deficit being covered by imports or exchanging mazut for gasoline.
Data from the Ministry of Oil’s document shows that only one-quarter of the country’s produced gasoline meets Euro 4 and Euro 5 standards.
Dehghan Nasrabadi also warned that Iran will face a diesel shortage this year.
According to the aforementioned official document, Iran’s diesel shortage also began last year; in 2023, there was a daily shortage of 1.5 million liters of diesel in the country, which was supplied through imports.
Iran is also facing a significant gas shortage in winter and a notable electricity imbalance in summer.
Recently, the Deputy Minister of Industry, Mine, and Trade announced in a letter to the Minister that starting from the beginning of summer, electricity delivery to the steel and cement industries will be halved.
Iran’s steel industry needs 5,500 megawatts, and the cement industry needs 1,000 megawatts of electricity.
Iran’s electricity losses in the outdated transmission and distribution network are equivalent to the steel industry’s electricity consumption. By modernizing it, a large part of the electricity shortage can be compensated, but no specific action has been taken in this regard over the past two decades.
In terms of gas losses, Iran ranks second in the world after Russia. Dehghan Nasrabadi also mentioned that annually, about 18.5 billion cubic meters of associated gas is flared in the country. Assuming an export price of 30 cents per cubic meter for Iranian gas, this results in an annual loss of over 5.5 billion dollars to the country.
These statistics also align with reports from the World Bank and the International Energy Agency.
To prevent flaring, Iran needs only a 5-billion-dollar investment, but this has not been done over the past two decades.
Dehghan Nasrabadi continued by saying that the issue of energy imbalance has two major consequences and risks for the country; first, the country’s energy security is endangered, and second, the production of the country’s industries decreases, resulting in reduced foreign exchange earnings and increased foreign exchange spending.
