Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh said late Sunday “ Expanding the national gas grid in particular to Sistan and Baluchestan Province in the southeast is a priority” of his ministry.
After returning from Munich Energy Conference, he told a live TV program that close to one million households would join the national gas network by next March.
Sistan and Baluchestan Province is the largest in Iran, with an area of 181,785 km² and a population of 2.5 million.
The major cities of the province include Chabahar, Iranshahr, Khash, Konarak, Zabol, and Zahedan. Iranshahr is the only city that is already linked to the massive national grid.
Underlining the daily 120-million cubic meter increase in gas production last year, the minister said, “The grid expansion operation to Sistan and Baluchestan will officially start within a few months. We are doing our best to stabilize gas production capacity in the first seven phases in the South Pars, and when new phases come on stream production will increase substantially and export to Iraq will commence.”
Pointing to gas supply via the national network, that covers 88 percent of all household and industrial sectors, Zanganeh said, “As per a proposal ratified by the Economy Council last year, around 2.5 million households in the urban and rural regions are slated to join the national grid within the next two years.” The $1.8 billion worth of funding needed to complete gas projects has already been provided.
Gas production capacity is expected to reach 1,300 million cubic meters per day in 2018, once the development projects currently in hand are completed. Seven phases of the South Pars gas field are projected to go on stream by March 2016.
South Pars is the world’s largest gas field, shared between Iran and Qatar, covering an area of 3,700 square kilometers of Iran’s territorial waters in the Persian Gulf.
