Focusing on energy swap operations in the Caspian Sea is much more cost-effective than extracting oil and gas from its deepwater hydrocarbon deposits.
According to ISNA, although the National Iranian Oil Company is experienced enough to tap into offshore reserves, mostly located in the Persian Gulf, it is still deprived of the cutting-edge technical know-how to do drilling at a depth of 1,000 meters.
Reportedly, the cost of producing oil in the Persian Gulf is guesstimated to stand at $9 per barrel, yet when it comes to deepwater drilling, the costs rocket up three- to four-fold, that is why energy experts, including Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh, believe that concentrating on swap deals in the region is more economical than extracting oil and gas.
According to Seyyed Hamid Hosseini, director of Iranian Oil Pipeline and Telecommunications Company, operations to swap crude oil consignment from the Caspian Sea littoral states to the port of Neka in northern Iran with deliveries in the Persian Gulf are being carried out twice a month.
"The pipeline's current transfer capacity stands at 370,000 barrels per day, yet plans are in place to raise it to as many as 500,000 barrels a day by the end of December before increasing it to 600,000 barrels per day in the future," he said.
Oil and gas company Dragon Oil, owned by Dubai-based Emirates National Oil Company, shipped an oil cargo from Turkmenistan to Neka Port in northern Iran in 2017 for swapping through the Persian Gulf, marking the first such operation by Iran since 2010.
The figures, based on the US Energy Information Administration estimates, show Iran's deposits in the Caspian Sea amount to 500 million barrels of crude and 28 billion cubic meters of natural gas.
Reportedly, oil reserves in other littoral states, namely Russia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, stand at 1.6, 5.8, 1 and 32 billion barrels respectively.
Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkmenistan are working to devise the Caspian Sea’s legal regime since the collapse of the Soviet Union, in order to divide up the waters and its natural resources for new drilling and pipelines.
However, territorial challenges have prevented the exploration of at least 20 billion barrels of oil and more than 6.8 trillion cubic meters of gas.
