OMV, Austria's largest oil and gas company, said on Friday it received 1 million barrels of crude oil from Iran in a spot delivery at the Italian port of Trieste which the energy group will send to its two refineries in Austria and Romania.
The delivery was Iran's first to OMV since 2012, when sanctions were imposed on the country. OMV is in talks with Iran about future deliveries, although no such contract has been signed yet, a spokesman said, Reuters reported.
Friday's delivery included Iranian heavy and light crude, he added. Rainer Seele, OMV's chief executive, has already announced that Iran's oil contracts are not yet fit for Austrian energy group OMV to invest in planned projects in the country, which hopes foreign investment will revamp its ageing oil infrastructure.
“This is taking quite a long time ... We have not yet defined a clean framework for the projects that are interesting for us. We can make an investment decision only when we really know what the framework and the conditions are," he noted.
Seele believes that talks to fine-tune a model contract for international oil companies in the Iranian market have not been successful yet, but stressed that the process is still ongoing.
OMV's envisaged projects are in the Zagros area in western Iran, including the Cheshmeh Khosh and Band-E-Karkheh fields where OMV had started operations in 2001, and the Fars field in the south.
