Mansour Daftarian, the head of the Iranian Gas Engineering Association, has announced the beginning of a decline in pressure in the South Pars gas field, stating that the country’s gas production will decrease by 30 to 40 percent over the next five years.
On March 29, Daftarian stated that studies on the production and consumption of gas in the National Iranian Oil Company indicate that the maximum gas production of South Pars in 2039, under current conditions, will be 400 million cubic meters per day. If the South Pars pressure boosting plan is not implemented, this amount will decrease to 200 million cubic meters per day.
South Pars holds a 79 percent share in Iran’s gas production. Iran extracts 770 million cubic meters of gas daily, with 610 million cubic meters coming from South Pars, a shared field between Iran and Qatar.
Daftarian said that the decline in the production of the South Pars gas field will begin in 2025, but it is already tangible.
Earlier, the Iranian regime’s Ministry of Oil and some international institutions had predicted that the decline in the pressure of the South Pars field would begin in 2023. Although in 2023, the Iranian regime managed to compensate for the production decline due to the pressure reduction by launching Phase 11 of South Pars, Iran no longer has new phases to launch, and the decline in gas production is inevitable.
The Iranian section of South Pars consists of 24 phases, all of which have been launched, and there is no room for the launch of a new phase to compensate for the production decline due to pressure reduction.
Earlier, both the National Gas Company and the National Development Fund had reported that, in the most optimistic scenario, the country’s gas production would still face a significant decline.
Challenges of South Pars Development
After the Iran nuclear deal, Iran signed a $5 billion contract with a consortium led by Total of France to develop Phase 11 of South Pars, half of which was for daily production of 56 million cubic meters of gas and the other half for the construction of a 20,000-ton platform with two massive compressors for boosting the mentioned phase in the coming years.
Total abandoned this project after the US withdrew from the nuclear deal, and its Chinese partner, CNPC, also withdrew from the project due to its inability to build the mentioned facilities and US sanctions.
The Iranian National Development Fund has warned that the country’s gas production will sharply decline by 2034 and will only meet one-third of domestic demand. However, on March 27th, the government of Ebrahim Raisi signed a contract to export 50 million cubic meters of gas to Iraq daily and asked Pakistan to execute a contract to purchase 20 million cubic meters of Iranian gas daily as soon as possible.
Iran also tripled its gas exports to Turkey in the past winter and compensated for the domestic gas shortage with significant consumption of mazut.
Javad Owji, the Minister of Oil, has also claimed that contracts with domestic companies will be signed to increase daily gas production by 150 million cubic meters in the coming years.
He had previously stated at the “Gas Exporting Countries Forum” that the country’s gas production is “42 percent” higher than the actual figure and claimed that the country’s gas production will increase by 270 million cubic meters in the coming years.
It is not clear why Owji claimed in an international conference that Iran’s daily gas production is 1.07 billion cubic meters while official statistics from the Ministry of Oil and international institutions state it as approximately 770 million cubic meters, and he further claimed that this figure will reach 1.3 billion cubic meters in the coming years.
The Iranian Ministry of Oil recently signed a $15 billion contract with several domestic companies, including PetroPars and subsidiaries of the Revolutionary Guards, most of which is related to the construction of 7,000-ton platforms and medium-capacity compressors for boosting South Pars.
Mansour Daftarian, the head of the Iranian Gas Engineering Association, says that if the South Pars pressure boosting plan is not implemented, the production of the Iranian section of this field will decrease to 200 million cubic meters per day over the next five years; in other words, it will be reduced by two-thirds of the Iranian section’s production of South Pars.
