The first well as a part of the development program of Forouzan offshore oilfield in the Persian Gulf has become operational, director of the field development project at the Iranian Offshore Oil Company said.
“Due to the priority given to developing border and joint fields, the project to increase output from the field has gained speed and the first well started production on April 20,” ILNA quoted Shahram Motevasel as saying.
This is the first well among the total eight planned to raise output in the field. After completion of digging the well, the drilling rig was transferred to another location for drilling to continue, Motevasel said.
A production well is used to extract oil or gas from subsurface deposits. Production wells are drilled deep into the earth directly into oil or gas rich deposits contained in underground formations.
A joint field located 100 km southeast of Kharg Island in Persian Gulf, Forouzan has 53 wells and is linked to Marjan Oilfield in Saudi Arabia.
More than 80% of the hydrocarbon reserves are in Saudi territorial waters.
The field produces 40,000 barrels of crude oil per day and the development project seeks to raise that by 12,000 barrels.
Oil from Forouzan is transferred to onshore installations via a 20-inch offshore pipeline for storage at Kharg Oil Terminal. The field was discovered in 1966 with an estimated in-place reserve of 2.3 billion barrels of crude.
More than 85% of the equipment and services used in the oilfield is provided by Iranian companies.
Increasing Output
The project to increase production from the Forouzan joint field is one of the several development projects on the agenda of the Iranian Offshore Oil Company.
IOOC is in charge of developing crude oil reservoirs in the Persian Gulf, including Abouzar, Hendijan, Bahregansar, Reshadat, Soroush, Norouz, Salman and Doroud fields as well as collecting associated petroleum gases in Kharg Island and Bahregan oil region.
Oilfields under the IOOC plans hold an estimated 100 billion barrels of crude, comprising roughly 15% of the country's total oil reserves.
The IOOC is also in charge of Iran's first floating production, storage and offloading vessel, named FPSO Cyrus. It extracts crude from the oil layer in South Pars, the giant gas field shared between Iran and Qatar.
Iran has seen a surge in production and export of oil and gas since 2021 as the country works to revive the 2015 nuclear deal that was abandoned by the US under Donald Trump in 2018 who then announced an economic blockade of Iran. The tough US sanctions are still in place.
However, energy expansion activities have continued despite the restrictions. Authorities say higher production will meet growing domestic demand and also ensure a quick return to international markets when the US acrimony eventually ends.
Negotiations are underway between Tehran and six major powers to lift the US sanctions that have hurt oil production since 2018.
Iran's oil exports, which had fallen sharply under international sanctions from 2012 to 2015, resumed their upward trend in 2016 after the signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2015. Iran's oil exports averaged 2.5 million barrels per day in 2017, up 200,000 barrels on 2016.
By the end of 2017 and before the US sanctions, Iran produced 4.7 million barrels of oil and gas condensate per day, of which 3.8 million was crude oil.
In its Monthly Oil Market report in February, OPEC put Iran's average production in 2021 at slightly over 2.4 million bpd, an increase from an average of 2 million bpd in 2020.
