South Pars Oil Output Exceeds 2.5m Barrels

Cumulative crude oil output from the South Pars Gas Field’s oil layer in the Persian Gulf has surpassed 2.5 million barrels over roughly five months, the operator of the oil layer said.

"The fifth crude oil cargo from South Pars, amounting to 500,000 barrels, will be shipped to foreign markets by the end of the week," Fardin As'adi was also quoted as saying by the news portal of National Iranian Oil Company on Tuesday.

Attaching great importance to stabilizing the extraction rate of the reservoir, As'adi said, "To keep the pressure of fluids within the pores of the reservoir high, drilling injection wells is on the agenda and operations will start as early as March 2018."

According to the official, daily production from the oil layer complies with cutting-edge reservoir engineering standards, which explain why extraction from the layer stands at 25,000 barrels per day on average, yet the reservoir pressure is still stable.

"Early estimates show that production can reach 80,000 barrels and 150,000 barrels per day in the second and third development phases of the oil layer respectively," he said, adding that regardless of state-of-the-art recovery techniques and only via water injection, the reservoir's recovery factor can increase by 10%.

NIOC plans to employ enhanced oil recovery methods to boost the extraction rate in fields by 35%. South Pars oil layer is located 130 kilometers off Iran's coast in the Persian Gulf with an estimated 7 billion barrels of oil in place, but it is hard to put an accurate estimate on the volume unless more exploratory wells are drilled.

  Negotiations With Maersk

According to Roham Qasemi, managing director of Petroiran Development Company, Danish conglomerate Maersk Group contributed to developing the first phase of the South Pars oil layer.

The Copenhagen-based giant is in negotiations to undertake the next phase of the project.

Maersk currently produces oil from the Danish and UK sections of the North Sea, Qatar, Algeria and Kazakhstan. It supports global oil and gas production by providing modern drilling services to oil companies worldwide.

“Maersk’s operational capacity and know-how to drill horizontal oil wells as deep as 10,000 meters is key to its success in developing the South Pars oil layer,” Qasemi said.

Iran began to extract crude oil from South Pars in March using FPSO Cyrus, a floating production storage and offloading vessel in March. The FPSO was reportedly built in Singapore and cost $300 million.

Iran is pushing for higher crude output from the joint field with Qatar.

The small Arab neighbor, which started extracting oil from the field in 1991, has already drilled more than 300 wells with the help of international oil giants. It has reportedly extracted more than 1 billion barrels of crude from the joint field in the past 25 years.