Natural gas production in the giant South Pars Gas Field in the Persian Gulf will increase by 84 million cubic meters per day by March, the managing director of Pars Oil and Gas Company said.
"The output has currently stabilized at 580mcm/d and will exceed 650mcm/d by the yearend," Mohammad Meshkinfam was quoted as saying by IRNA.
He said satellite platform 14C and the main platform 14A, installed in September, added over 28 million cubic meters to the field’s overall capacity. Both platforms were built by the Iran Shipbuilding and Offshore Industries Company in Bandar Abbas in southern Iran. The company is a subsidiary of the Industrial Development & Renovation Organization of Iran.
A consortium of domestic companies is working on Phase 14, including the Iranian Offshore Engineering and Construction Company, IDRO and the National Iranian Drilling Company.
"Other major platforms, namely 13B, 13D, have been loaded and sent to their locations in the Persian Gulf," he added, noting that the huge structures will be installed as soon as weather conditions are normal.
Following the installation of the two platforms, extraction from Phase 13 will reach 28 million cubic meters per day.
A second major pipeline of South Pars Gas Field's Phase 13 was connected to onshore facilities earlier this month.
Phase 13 consists of offshore infrastructure, including 38 wells, four platforms and four pipelines stretching over 90km off the Persian Gulf coast, as well as onshore facilities, including four gas refining units.
Regarding the offshore platform of the field's Phase 22, Meshkinfam said it has already been installed and as soon as hook-up operations are completed, 14mcm of sour gas extracted from the phase per day will be piped to onshore sweetening trains.
“ISOICO is completing platform 24A and it is ready to be shipped to its location, he noted, asserting that the platform will pump as much as 14mcm of natural gas per day.
The giant South Pars gas field is the world's largest shared between Iran and Qatar, covering an area of 3,700 square kilometers of Iran's territorial waters in the Persian Gulf.
More than $72 billion has been injected into the huge energy venture since work started on South Pars field and investments are expected to rise to $87 billion.
Iran has drawn over 1 trillion cubic meters of gas from South Pars since the first of its 24 planned phases came on stream in 2002.
The country now produces 880 million cubic meters of gas per day, which is planned to reach 1.3 billion cubic meters when all the phases are completed by 2020.
