The onshore refinery of South Pars Gas Field Phase 14 in the Persian Gulf will come on stream by June 2021, the program manager of the phase said.
“The project to construct the refinery has registered over 83% progress,” Shana quoted Mohammad Mehdi Tavassolipur as saying.
He referred to problems caused by the coronavirus, which has delayed or suspended many projects, and hit funding as the main reasons slowing down construction work.
“We are doing all we can to address the problems and commission the refinery within a year.”
South Pars is divided into 24 phases, all but Phase 11 are up and running. Since no refinery will be built for Phase 11, the Phase 14 refinery is the last onshore processing facility in the huge field.
Tavassolipur noted that the offshore section of the phase is complete and all the decks are operating.
The offshore section of the phase includes four platforms, each with a capacity to produce 14.2 million cubic meters of gas per day.
Now that the new refinery is under construction, “sour gas from the phase is sent through a pipeline to refineries in phases 12 and 19.
MAPNA, the Iranian conglomerate involved in oil, gas and other industrial projects, is building the onshore treatment facilities in the phase.
The company undertakes major engineering, procurement, construction work plus running compressor and metering stations. Its name is associated also with granule making units, steam generation and distribution, fuel supply systems, facilities for transfer of sea water, chemical and sulfur storage tanks and electrical systems.
Phase 14 produces 56.6 million cubic meters of gas, 75,000 barrels of gas condensates and 400 tons of sulfur per day.
It also produces 1 million tons a year of liquefied petroleum gas and one million tons a year of ethane for domestic use and supplies feedstock to petrochemical companies mostly based in the Pars Special Energy Economic Zone in Bushehr Province.
Phase 11 Operations Begin
The first wellhead jacket of South Pars Gas Field Phase 11 and its accessories were loaded from Naft Sazeh company in Qeshm Island on Thursday to be installed in the field in the Persian Gulf, 135 km off Assalouyeh coast.
Installation process of Platform 11B is expected to be complete by June. Drilling will start when the 2,120-ton structure is in place, the Oil Ministry news agency Shana reported.
Phase 11 is the only one among the total 24 phases of the giant South Pars field which has not been developed and this is the first step to advance the huge and costly gas project.
The project aims to produce 56.6 million cubic meters of gas per day plus 75,000 barrels of gas condensate. Gas will be transferred to onshore refineries in Assalouyeh and Kangan in Bushehr Province, which need two 32-inch pipelines stretching over 270 kilometers.
Petropars Group is in charge of developing Phase 11. In 2017 the project was given to this company in cooperation with Total of France and CNPC of China. However, due to mounting US pressure and tough economic sanctions in 2018, the two foreign firms fearing America’s wrath walked away from the mega deal.
A decision was made last October to handover development of Phase 11 to Petropars and use n domestic potential and capability to get the job done.
The giant South Pars field, which Iran shares with Qatar, covers an area of 9,700 square kilometers, 3,700 square kilometers of which are in Iran’s territorial waters. The remaining 6,000 square kilometers in Qatari waters are known as North Dome.
The field is estimated to hold approximately 14 trillion cubic meters of recoverable gas reserves along with 18 billion barrels of recoverable liquefied natural gas reserves in the Iranian waters.
Production from the giant gas field has reached 700 million cubic meters per day. More than $80 billion has been invested in the field since 2001 when the first well was drilled.
South Pars constitutes 96% of liquefied petroleum gas, 100% of ethane and 55% of sulfur produced in Iran. Products (condensates, natural gas and other depravities) worth $270 billion have been extracted from the field in 18 years.
