Crude production from Khesht Oilfield in Fars Province will commence by the end of the current fiscal in March, said the head of the department that oversees the performance of reservoirs in the National Iranian Oil Company
"Phase 1 maximum output capacity is guesstimated at 30,000 barrels per day," Karim Zobeidi, was quoted as saying by the NIOC news portal on Tuesday.
The official said crude from this oilfield will be transferred to Bandar Genaveh Terminal in Bushehr Province via a 97km pipeline for export.
The field’s production will surpass 30,000 bpd after drilling operations of Phase 2 ends
A 10-inch pipeline for this transfer is almost complete and will become operational soon.
According to Zobeidi the field’s production will surpass 30,000 bpd after drilling operations of Phase 2 ends.
"Work in progress in the oilfield includes laying pipelines that connect single wellheads to a manifold or process equipment, building injection facilities, desalting utilities as well as installing gas compression to process and export up to 30,000 bpd of crude by pipeline," he said.
It also has four pipelines, stretching over 24 kilometers and 97km of export pipeline to Genaveh Port.
According to the news portal, the South Zagros Oil and Gas Production Company— the operator of the field and a subsidiary of the Iranian Central Oil Fields Company— is involved in exploration and production activities in the inland oil and gas fields where upstream projects have been delayed due to priority given to oil production from joint reserves.
Exploration activities in southern Fars Province commenced in 2015 to find oil and gas in a geologically complex anticlinal trap. Development of the Khesht field, 45km from the southwestern city of Kazeroun, started in 2006.
The field is estimated to contain more than a billion barrels of crude oil in place, of which 270,000 million barrels are recoverable.
There has been relatively little exploration and development work in the past decade, yet Iran is optimistic about finding more reserves with the help of modern technology.
The Zagros fold and thrust belt—a series of mountainous foothills adjacent to an orogenic belt, which forms due to contractional tectonics—extends for about 2,000km from southeastern Turkey through northern Syria and Iraq to western and southern Iran. It has excellent structural traps for the accumulation of oil and gas and is among the major oil and gas fields.
The giant fields of the Zagros belt fall within the greater context of the Arabian-Iraq-Persian basin and contain cumulative recoverable reserves estimated at 87 billion barrels of oil and 514 trillion cubic feet of gas.
